The international association: Origins, history, and development

In this special issue of Children and Youth Services Review, we present a sampling of research and scholarship performed by members of the International Association for Outcome-Based Evaluation and Research on Family and Children's Services (iaOBERfcs). The iaOBERfcs is a small group of scholars in this arena, who have been invited to come together to work collaboratively on descriptive and comparative evaluations and research. The Association has been able to meet annually, in the various countries of its members, since 2001. We have organised these offerings to represent different theoretical perspectives and/or practical examples of outcome evaluation, embedded within the cultural and national perspectives of Association members from a variety of countries. Not all countries included in the International Association can be represented here, but we hope that this selection will provide a tasting of the fruits of our collaborations. In a recent seminar we proposed an image for depicting the International Association: we used the image of a tree. We will use that image for describing the history of the International Association for Outcome-Based Evaluation and Research on Family and Children's Services (iaOBERfcs).