Session: Cultural Adaption of Family Ebis for Engaging Diverse Families and Reducing Health Disparities (Society for Prevention Research 25th Annual Meeting)

The symposium will present a recommended framework for successfully culturally adapting family EBIs and attaining high engagement and retention rates. Family EBIs are the most effective prevention interventions with long-term positive preventive outcomes of a broad range of behavioral health issues. However, attracting culturally diverse families into EBIs can be problematic because of lack of cultural appropriateness in recruitment methods or intervention implementation and content. It is expensive and time consuming to create new culturally specific family EBIs, hence, culturally adapting existing EBIs is recommended. This symposium will focus on positive outcomes of two family EBIs in diverse countries. The symposium brings together researchers from different countries and universities who have actively been pursuing research in this area.

The first brief introduction: “Cultural Adaptation for Diverse Families of Family EBIs” will present the health disparity issues and recommended solutions to engage more culturally diverse families including review of the recommended cultural adaptation framework. This presentation will follow the October 2016 Prevention Science publication content. The other presenters will discuss how they used this cultural adaptation framework to make changes in their family EBI and their engagement, retention and outcome results.

 The first paper, “Cultural Adaptations and Engagement Results of the Family Competence Program: A Spanish Cultural Adaptation of the Strengthening Families Program 12-16”.

The second paper, “Cultural Adaptations, Engagement and Outcomes of the Thailand Strengthening Families Program 12-16”.

The third paper, “Cultural appropriateness and perceptions of change after participation in the SFP 10-14 in Panama”

At the conclusion of the presentations, the discussant will make some summary statements and moderate a

discussion between the presenters and the symposium attendees. It is expected that the diversity of approaches

will be appealing to the SPR Annual Meeting participants.