The overall purpose of this application for the K01 Mentored Career Development Award for New Minority Scholars is to provide me with the opportunity to work with a strong team of researchers and consultants to assist in my development as an independent researcher. In addition to seeking focused mentorship to increase my research skills, the mentoring team will oversee my research project focusing on the cultural adaptation of the empirically validated Parent Management Training Oregon (PMT-O) intervention program to better fit the cultural characteristics of at-risk Latino/a families living in the Midwest of the U.S. My personal background as a trilingual first generation Latina immigrant, my clinical training as a family therapist delivering services to a primarily Mexican-American population, and my research experience of evaluating the delivery of such services have prepared me to successfully meet the primary goal of the K01 mechanism, which is to launch promising scholars by training them to become independent researchers with the potential of making important contributions in their field of work. The proposed training goals that provide me with mentoring and address current gaps in my research skills are: (1) to learn how to adapt and expand existing preventive interventions to make them ecologically valid and culturally sensitive to at-risk Latino/a populations; (2) to become skilled in running preventive intervention trials and learn about approaches that will increase the recruitment and retention rates of Latinos/as participating in research trials; (3) to develop sound quantitative methodological skills that will assist with testing program efficacy; (4) to learn how to integrate quantitative and qualitative methodologies in adapting interventions and evaluating their efficacy and effectiveness; (5) to learn about how Latino/a families respond to multiple assessment battery so that I may develop more ecologically valid measurements in future research studies with Latino/a populations; (6) to increase my publication record and to prepare and submit a R01 proposal to NIMH to further test the findings of this study. The goals of the proposed research project are directly linked to my training goals and will provide an ideal opportunity for me to receive mentored training while engaged in carrying out the multiple activities of the research project. The research project can be divided into three general categories: (1) the adaptation of a preventive intervention (PMT-O) to fit the cultural characteristics of at-risk Latino/a families; (2) the collection of pilot data with intervention trials of the adapted PMT-O and control groups to test the efficacy of the intervention over a 18-month period; and (3) the adaptation and development of existing assessment instruments used in PMT-O to better fit the cultural characteristics of Latino/a families.
