“… Promoting cross-national collaboration on outcome evaluation in the area of health and social services – especially child and family services – requires continuing, collaborative and determined efforts on our part.

Collaborative strategies include replication of successful programs across countries; sharing knowledge of methodology and approaches that we can utilize or adapt; explaining implementation problems that we encounter in conducting outcome-based research; circulating information about program innovations and their effectiveness; and conducting parallel studies in various countries regarding the outcome of diverse approaches to similar problems.

Such collaboration could help to improve our efforts to assess the outcome of child and family services. Above all, it would contribute to the goals of achieving greater clarity about the specifics of “best practices” in child and family services; it would help in designing protocols for assessing outcomes; and ultimately it could lead to improvements in service delivery...”