Recently, the Institute of Medicine (Eden, Wheatley, McNeil, & Sox, 2008; Sox & Greenfield, 2009) publicly called for increased effectiveness research to determine the most effective and cost-efficient health care methods. This mandate corresponds to the American Occupational Therapy Association’s Centennial Vision (AOTA, 2007), in which the profession is exhorted to demonstrate through research that its services effectively help people maintain participation in work, school, and family and community roles despite illness, injury, or disability.
Occupational therapy scholars have called for effectiveness and efficiency research for more than two decades (e.g., Baum, 2006; Case-Smith & Powell, 2008; Christiansen, 1983; Corcoran, 2004; Holm, 2000; Kielhofner, Hammel, Finlayson, Helfrich, & Taylor, 2004; Law, 2002; Mosey, 1996; Moyers, 2007). In this article, effectiveness is defined as an examination of practice to determine whether and how well a specific intervention...
