Situated Motives of Lay Participants in Community Collaboratives for Children's Mental Health

Publicly funded programs in many industrialized countries increasingly require the participation of citizens. In this article, I explore the "situated motives" of family members who participated alongside professionals in implementing children's mental health programs in two communities in the United States. I conducted in-depth interviews with family members and observed monthly meetings of Community Collaboratives to assess how family members understood their participation. The inductive data analysis demonstrates that family members participated (a) as a therapeutic outlet, (b) to pay it forward, (c) to gain new skills, (d) to have a voice, and/or (e) to empower the community. I then use Giddens' concepts of "life politics" and "emancipatory politics" to explore how these accounts variously reflected lay members' orientations as consumers, empowered individuals, and/or citizen advocates. In the absence of articulated and specific objectives for family participation, these "situated motives" were salient and had implications for how policy was implemented.