Developing Interventions from within the Community Posted on February 15, 2006 Philip A. Fisher (bio) explains why participatory research with American Indian communities is growing.

Consistent with the larger approach of community-based participatory research, there is an increasing recognition that work in American Indian communities needs to incorporate the community members at the very start of the process. That's due to a combination of factors. One is just the historical context of tribes in this country, and the fact that there has been so much that has taken power and control away from tribes that the idea of empowerment is just really critical and central to anything that needs to go on and just a central value.

I think that's part of it, and the other part just has to do with the extent to which tribes have their own governing structure and their own way of doing business, and so it's really critical to interface with the existing structure in the conduct of the work. There's that component, but that's sort of the extent to which you interface with existing tribal governmental structures. The other emphasis is really on the development of programs that are specifically kind of culturally grounded, that are more from the ground up.

There has been a lot of discussion in the prevention literature about different ways to develop programs. There's the idea that you could take existing prevention approaches and either implement them directly with high levels of fidelity, that you could take existing intervention approaches and adapt them, or that you could really start from the ground up and really build intervention approaches.

There is no question that all of those different approaches have some legitimacy and some strengths and limitations. The approach that we have chosen to take is one of building from the ground up. It's a fascinating process and takes a long time. It's also something in the end that the tribes have real ownership of in the sense that when it's done, the programs are of the tribe; the intervention components really emanate from cultural and community values. In terms of issues that are at the core of a lot of concerns in prevention, things like sustainability and whether the programs will continue after the projects are done, I think that ground-up projects have good potential to create that.

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