The paper of Lotte Gosens entitled “Development of a personalised substance use disorder treatment for people with mild intellectual disabilities or borderline intellectual functioning: An intervention mapping approach" has been selected for the 2022 International Research Prize.
Congratulations to all the co-authors.
Citation jury
Empirical evidence increasingly shows that a personalised approach to mental health issues is more likely to be successful. However, how do we use such an approach for a multi-layered, challenging issue such as substance use by people with intellectual disabilities? The paper by Gosens and colleagues, using an Intervention Mapping approach provides a roadmap - from conceptual issues to grounding research in a sound theoretical framework, undertaking an intervention program, and demonstrating its efficacy through evaluation. The paper frames research objectives not as a priori hypotheses but emanating out of needs assessment undertaken within the research project. Even though country-specific issues will be different, the paper allows other researchers to follow the various steps and in the process generate ideas for adapting to their specific settings.