Hire From the Community Posted on March 19, 2007 Teresa D. LaFromboise (bio) suggests hiring intervention staff from the community.

The project I'm working on right now, one of the tribal members is a Ph.D. school psychologist. We publish together, we were in graduate school together, we shared the same doctoral adviser, so that's a very different kind of situation so there obviously is a tribal member.

The interventionists are all tribal members. So this one is really unique and great in that way. I often try to involve tribal members particularly in the data collection or in the case of the intervention if at all possible training the interventionists from the community.

And I also think that one of the things that communities are beginning to expect when you do, certainly if you do a major research study that you would hire people on a fairly permanent basis at least for the year, full-time jobs. They look at it as a source of economic development.

So there are tradeoffs with that. So I think it is really important; it would make a big difference if you had the money to hire people in the community. And certainly it will make a big difference in terms of the participation rate.

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