Building Programs from the Ground Up Posted on February 15, 2006 Philip A. Fisher (bio) discusses the pros and cons of grounded research.

The pros of doing ground-up as I said, especially given that there has been historically so much of an emphasis on taking traditional cultural values out of tribal communities and really assimilating native people into the larger context of U.S. culture, that the programs that build from the ground up really have much more potential to be relevant to the community members. They have the potential to really focus on the values that are most core to the people who are in the community. Therefore, there is no question that you are going to be interfacing with the tribe in a manner that has the greatest degree of salience to them. I think that's the pro.

The con, and again I think there is a single disadvantage, is the timeline and the potential outcomes in especially initiating a new project don't fit as well into the conventional NIH funding model as taking an existing intervention and adapting it in some way. That is, it takes a long time to develop the intervention, and although it's possible and we've had several grants that were funded to develop interventions, but that takes a chunk of time out of the initial work. So once it's developed, then there is still a long-term process to evaluating the effectiveness of the intervention. It's not as straight a path from development to evaluation to dissemination. I think that's the shortcoming.

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