Session: Integrating Cultural Adaptation and Implementation Science: Implications for Social Work Practice and Research (Society for Social Work and Research 20th Annual Conference - Grand Challenges for Social Work: Setting a Research Agenda for the Future)

Culturally adapted interventions constitute a promising alternative for addressing widespread health and mental health disparities experienced by diverse populations in the U.S. However, culturally adapted interventions continue to be largely unused in health and mental health care settings, and alternative community-based organizations. Critical questions need to be answered with regards to programs of research aimed at integrating cultural adaptation and implementation science in order to address the gap between research and practice. For example, which models of cultural adaptation lead to the highest levels of engagement, retention, and efficacy? What aspects of culture need to be taken into account in the adaptation process? Which models of implementation science are most likely to facilitate the use of culturally adapted efficacious interventions in routine practice? This symposium presents three studies with contrasting emphases on the integration of cultural adaptation and implementation science with diverse populations in the U.S. The contributions of each investigation will be presented along with implications for integrating cultural adaptation and implementation science research, with a special focus on social work practice and research.  

The first paper consists of a culturally-focused developmental study with 750 Mexican (MA) and Dominican (DA) families recruited from pre-kindergarten (pre-k) and kindergarten (K) classrooms across New York City. This study examined Latino parenting, including its values, goals and practices.  Model testing examined associations over time between cultural values, parenting practices and child functioning. In addition to providing detailed results on these analyses, implications of research findings will be discussed with regards to the critical role that culturally-focused studies have for the design of studies seeking to integrate cultural adaptation and implementation science.

The second paper presents an investigation that compares and contrasts two differentially culturally adapted interventions of an efficacious parenting intervention. This program of prevention research was implemented with low-income Latino immigrant parents in a challenging urban setting characterized by intense contextual adversity. The development of this program of applied prevention research will be presented according to the principles of the Cultural Adaptation Process Model (CAP), which integrates community engagement and cultural adaptation processes. Having established initial efficacy, this program of research is expanding towards effectiveness studies aimed at integrating an applied model of cultural adaptation and implementation science in an urban setting.   

The third paper blends principles of cultural adaptation and implementation science to inform the local adaptation and customization of a health care manager program to improve the physical health of Hispanics with serious mental illness (SMI). The authors will describe how they used the collaborative intervention planning framework, an approach that combines community-based participatory research principles and intervention mapping procedures to customize an existing health-care manager intervention to a new patient population (Hispanics with SMI) and provider group (social workers) to increase its fit with the local community. This study illustrates one approach that can be used to involve community stakeholders in the intervention adaptation process from the very beginning to enhance the transportability of a health-care manager intervention in order to improve the health of people with SMI.