This dissertation will use an action research approach of inquiry into the development of collaborative communities focused on serving youth in out-of-home care.  The collaborations involve multiple private and public agencies.  For the purpose of this dissertation two existing collaborations have been chosen, one that focuses on Kinship Care and another that focuses on youth transitioning out of foster care into adulthood.

Previous attempts at evaluation have focused on assessing the collaboration’s “effectiveness” and the “impact” they are having on their community.  From a traditional research paradigm this presents many challenges, one of the most basic being data collection since each collaborative partner has unique reporting requirements for their organization.  The previous efforts focused on questions related to obtaining the “best” set of data to determine impact and effectiveness.  The journey to finding the “best” set of data inevitably leads to an endless search for common definitions, common collection methods and common reporting.

Approaching this inquiry with a constructionist paradigm provides several benefits that may prove useful to the collaborations and their communities.  This inquiry aims to shift the dialogue from finding the “best” set of data to addressing how the collaboration discovers, acts, and learns.

This dissertation will give special attention to the role of “infrastructure,” and how it influences the thinking and acting processes within the collaborative community.  Infrastructure in this context refers to the people (roles), service delivery models, policies, processes, practices, paperwork, etc. associated with performing the day-to-day tasks of the collaborative partners.  In constructionist literature the term discourse is often used in a similar fashion to describe the meaning, metaphors, and practices that make up a particular interpretation of an object.  An effect of living in this technological age is that more and more of our business practices have become standardized and automated.  Automating is typically accomplished by bringing end-users and technology professionals together, in a time-limited manner, to “map” out processes for the purpose of automating them.  In essence, the discourse around an object is imbedded into the infrastructure.

This poses a real challenge for social service agencies because it can freeze the discourse.  It also creates a subtle but critical shift from the discourse itself (in this case, the social issue of children in out of home care) to systems development.  Social workers can find themselves thinking and acting at the mercy of their infrastructure, that they may or may not have had a hand in creating.  This becomes extremely important when new thinking is introduced to the discourse.  A shift in “thinking” about children in out of home care may not result in a shift in action because the “previous way of thinking” is imbedded in the underlying infrastructure.

This action research will focus on developing a platform for collaborators and their community constituents to engage in a rich ongoing process of discovery, action, and learning.  It is hypothesized that shifting to discourse, for the sake of discourse development – not for the sake of system automation, will result in members of the community transforming into powerful contributors to their discourse (their story) verses passive participants of various discourses frozen within various infrastructures.  It is hoped that by unmasking the infrastructural limitations a community can increase its ability to move from discourse to action.