Session: Deconstructing the Black Box: Synergizing Fidelity and Adaptation Processes to Enhance Intervention Engagement and Effectiveness for Students of Color (Society for Prevention Research 25th Annual Meeting)

Evidence-based interventions (EBIs) are often developed without explicit consideration to local systems constraints or cultural assets of diverse target populations. In the past, implementation fidelity was often characterized as an opposing process to adaptation; adaptation was viewed as a violation of fidelity and thus to be avoided. This approach, however, discounted the importance of needed cultural and local adaptations to enhance intervention fit, participant engagement, and effectiveness with diverse populations. Such modifications to original EBIs may be necessary to meaningfully engage and retain intervention participants (maximizing dosage) and to ensure that the interventions’ core components work in the way in which the developers originally intended. The present symposium is designed to highlight our evolving discourse on the local adaptation of evidence-based interventions, from a dialectical view of “fidelity versus adaptation” to one in which these implementation considerations can synergize to reinforce engagement and effectiveness. This symposium also strengthens the literature related to cultural/local adaptations of evidence-based interventions in school-based settings.

Paper 1 highlights the process of adapting of an evidence-based teacher coaching intervention to motivate and develop teacher culturally responsive classroom practices with students of color in a suburban/urban fringe school district and reports initial outcomes of an RCT testing the adapted intervention. Paper 2 uses a mixed methods design to conduct a deep-structure analysis of the factors in teacher-initiated adaptations, to better understand aspects of adaptation that are congruent with an EBIs core theoretical contents, in contrast to aspects incongruent these contents. Paper 3 describes content adaptations to Coping Power, an evidence-based anger management preventive intervention delivered by clinicians in Baltimore City High Schools to primarily African American urban youth. A discussant with expertise in engaging diverse populations in intervention and treatment will lead a dialogue on practice implications and future research directions.