Directing an R13 on Adapting Interventions Posted on June 22, 2008 Luis H. Zayas (bio) describes his R13 as a meeting of the minds to help develop culturally valid programs for Latinos.

I direct this R13, which is a National Institute of Mental Health-funded Conference Grant, it's called. And what we wanted to do was make working meetings where we would get colleagues together, peers, to bat around some ideas and drill down, think harder about them, come up with some new ways of thinking about it.

In our case it was what do you have to do to make interventions for children, youth, and families, particularly parents, how do you make those culturally congruent to the experiences of the people who are receiving the intervention? So we really wanted to get at that because in the literature there's a lot of commentary about, "This is what we need to do, and these are the cultural constructs," but no one really sat down and codified them or brought any common logic, any organization, to them.

So the R13 is really a chance, it's a meeting of the minds if you will, for peers to come and talk about what is it we need to think about when we're adapting interventions? Because we know that most interventions have been developed with other populations in mind, and those populations may not have -- that is, the ones that we're interested in, in this case Hispanic children, youth, and families -- weren't necessarily included in the original development and the standardization of the intervention. So what do we need to make it congruent to them?

And that's our job is to conceptualize and hopefully come up with some methodologies so that we can standardize and help other investigators do the kind of adaptations we're talking about.

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