Promising Practices Selection
Once we achieved our final list of 13 keywords, it was time to select the Promising Practices that our group believes the Bloomington-Normal Community should implement.
We determined to search each term using quotation marks (" ") in the Promising Practices database to see what the results yielded. To limit our results we tagged "mental health & mental disorders," as well as the "evidence-based" category. This was to ensure that our searches would result only in practices with a statistical significance that is also related to behavioral health.
We then compiled a list in a single document of all the Promising Practices which appeared after searching each inputted term. Many of the terms yielded the same Promising Practice, so our team began to sift through to eliminate any duplicates from the document. Following this process, we ended up with a list of 62 total practices from the list of 13 keywords. From this list of 62 practices, our goal was to find 3-5 Promising Practices which would satisfy our subgoal and also be applicable to the Bloomington-Normal community.
Therefore, our team proceeded to divide the practices into three separate categories: practices that meet our goal, practices that we like but will not apply to Bloomington-Normal, and practices that do not meet our goal. As a result, we were able to trim our list from 62 Promising Practices down to 10, yet we still had too many.
Our next step as a group was to thoroughly read over and discuss each remaining practice to determine how closely it met our subgoal (“Support educational programs and media campaigns aimed at reducing behavioral health stigma, increasing mental health awareness and/or improving mental health status.”). We also kept in mind the primary needs of the Bloomington-Normal community, and we wanted to make sure that different areas of behavioral health were represented. Finally, after a lengthy discussion, we created a final list of 4 Promising Practices.