ABSTRACT
In this article we comment on the other articles in this issue, which describe the national evaluation of the Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services for Children and Their Families Program. The commentary focuses on 4 major themes. The first theme is the complexity of community-based systems of care and the special challenge that this presents for their evaluation. The second theme is the need for theories of change for systems of care to be more clearly developed and elucidated. The third theme discusses the implications of the diversity of the population served for the development of interventions and for the application of interventions that have been tested on other populations. The fourth theme examines strategies for conducting evaluations, given the constraints that exist in large evaluations of community-wide interventions.
