Building on Early Childhood Context: Participatory Research Strategies with Low Income African-American Parents to Improve Outcomes for Children in the Northside Achievement Zone, a Promise Neighborhood

Introduction:  The prevention field is still exploring how best to translate research into effective prevention and intervention strategies to improve outcomes for children of color in high poverty areas.  In this poster, we will describe the community-based participatory research (CBPR) used to develop Family Academy: College Bound Babies (CBB), offered by the Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ), a federally-funded Promise Neighborhood in Minneapolis, MN that is building an education and support pipeline from birth to college. CBB was developed with parents, practitioners and researchers at every step and has engaged over 100 parents so far. Residents in the NAZ geographic zone are primarily African-American and the zone has high rates of poverty, family and community violence, and a large achievement gap. CBB seeks to close the education/opportunity gap before it starts by teaching everyday parenting skills (language/literacy and positive parenting), expanding parenting repertoires, and building social support among parents of children aged birth to 3. 

Methods:   

• Phase 1 (2008-10): participant-observation, focus groups, key informant interviews, and surveys to develop a broad knowledge-base about parenting in our geographic context. 
• Phase 2 (2011-12): Phase 1 findings used to identify and theater-test specific barrier-busting and engagement practices, evidenced-based curricular elements (i.e. parenting strategies), facilitation style and other model features to build our CBB model (N=94).
• Phase 3 (2013): effectiveness and validation study, random control trial design in a community context (in process, N=37).

Results/Discussion: Phase 1 participatory qualitative results analysis revealed that while parents want the best for their kids, they were generally not engaging in behaviors proven to promote language and literacy and they predominantly used harsh and coercive parenting strategies. They felt constrained and wanted more parenting strategies and options.  In Phase 2, we used this knowledge to develop our model where our “gold-standard” includes the elements necessary for implementation in a community context.  Early results from phase 3 show that CBB changes parents' knowledge, skills and repertoire of parenting practices; AND that parents use these new skills in their everyday lives.

Conclusion: Using CBPR methods, we gained a deep understanding of the unique challenges faced in early childhood and parenting in NAZ. Thus, we developed the CBB model within its’ specific community context, eliminating the “translation gap” in moving from a laboratory (i.e. researcher controlled) setting to a community-based implementation.