Adapting Material with Foster Parent Focus Groups Posted on March 1, 2006 Joe Price (bio) describes the process his group went through as they adapted an intervention for a group of diverse foster parents.

We had the challenge that in San Diego, it's a fairly diverse population. About a third of our foster parents are Latino, and within that group about 20% of the sample overall were Spanish speaking, so we had to adapt the measures, and we had to adapt the intervention to Spanish speaking as well.

And what we did initially to do that is we had focus groups going back to the foster parent associations that really were partners with us. We said we'd like to have focus groups with African American and Latino parents because the intervention in Oregon was primarily with Caucasians. So what we did was we took the material, a couple of the sessions, and we sat down in a group, Patti and I did, with these foster parent groups and said, "Here are the materials. What do you think? Is there anything here that you find offensive or that wouldn't work within your particular culture?"

We got feedback from that. Luckily, we didn't have anybody say, "Oh, this is just not going to work." Most of it, they said, "Yeah. This sounds good. This sounds just like basic parenting," but it's just basic parent management training, basic behavioral approaches, so they looked at it and said, "Yeah, this looks OK." Now they weren't so sure about the timeout and whether that was going to work and how that works, and we explained to them a little bit how we do timeout.

We explained to them that we saw foster parents as having 4 roles: being a referee, a detective, a teacher, and then the last one we said an angel. We weren't real sure about that last one. How was that going to go over in these different cultural groups? One of the African American parents said, "Well, we're guardian angels. We're not just angels; we're guardian angels," and everybody in the group says, "Yeah, yeah." Well, we then went to Latino parents, and they said, "Yes, absolutely. We are guardian angels of these children." So we then adapted the term, not just angels but guardian angels with the kids, so that came out of direct feedback with the groups.

Within the Latinos, we did a focus group with English-speaking and Spanish-speaking, and then we hired group facilitators who were bilingual to be able to do that. Then we translated all the materials, the manuals. We had a translator, professional translator, do that, but then also the group facilitator who was bilingual would help us in the terminology. For instance, when we were using charts, they were saying that in Spanish, you know, we got to find another way to say this because the parents are going "Charts? That means like a schedule. What do you mean a schedule?" We had to find another term to really make that a little bit more easier to understand.

And all along, our bilingual group facilitators were giving us feedback and saying, "You know, I think we need to change this word or this phrasing of this a little bit". That first year was really adapting the material to the nuances of the language, but that seemed to go fairly well. The communities were very open to giving us feedback and the foster parents, particularly those early foster parent association meetings that we had focus groups with. That was really key.

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