Interventions Take on Local Flavor Posted on February 15, 2006 Philip A. Fisher (bio) explains that adaptation for local communities is an integral part of his approach.

Well, transportability again in terms of this particular approach I think is transportability of process more than of content. That is it's not about that you've got the storytelling intervention let's say with the home visitation component, and you did it in community A, and then it just gets taken wholesale and put into community B.

For instance, with storytelling if it was going to a different tribe, you'd want those tribes' stories and legends to be part of the storytelling curriculum rather than another tribe's. So as a result, I think it's more showing what the intervention can look like but expecting that in each community it's going to take on a local flavor of its own, need adaptation, and therefore need to be tested again in its new form.

It fits somewhat into the overall concepts of transportability as we typically understand them in prevention, but it is more of an emerging kind of unfolding than it is once you've got the core, then you can stick with the core. I think it has some challenges that way.

On the other hand, because these interventions are typically seated in communities and it's rare, in my experience, that much of this kind of research involves outside people doing the intervention work, so to a certain extent they're effectiveness trials from the start. That doesn't mean again that they've been disseminated broadly, but what it does mean is that the question of can they be moved into the community has really already been addressed by the time that the evidence of efficacy has been garnered.

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