Begin with the Question of Cultural Fit Posted on July 7, 2008 One practice does not fit all, states Enola K. Proctor (bio).

For a very long time, we've sometimes thought that one practice fits all.

New services, new interventions have been developed not only in social work but in health more broadly and in fields of mental health, substance abuse, in pretty controlled settings, and that 's been important to ensure and enhance the quality of the research, but when we conduct our research in laboratory or clinical or ivory tower settings, then when we try to move those treatments and interventions into real world settings of care, we often find problems of fit. We find problems of acceptability, the fact that providers are skeptical about the appropriateness of interventions, because they were developed with populations that look and are much different than the populations who are needing them in those particular settings of care.

So it's very important that we move this question about who's the intervention appropriate for, where is it going to fit, not at the tail end, viewing almost a linear process where we develop interventions and then we try to extend them as-is into real world systems of care. Rather, it's important that we take these questions of cultural fit, congruence with a setting, congruence with the resources in a setting of care, provider training, the ability to pay for these services. We have to begin to ask those questions at the front end of treatment development so that we're actually testing and shaping interventions at the outset for the real world instead of viewing this fit as an add-on at the tail end.

« Back to Article