The Indian Family Wellness Project is a collaboration between the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and Oregon Social Learning Center. The project involves the development, implementation, and evaluation of a family-based, culturally competent preventive intervention for Native American families enrolled in the Siletz Tribal Head Start Program. The prevention has been designed to target known family-based mediators of antisocial child behavior and early substance abuse. It will introduce families to traditional Native American child-rearing practices, and foster the utilization of those practices in order to promote healthy development among Native American preschool children. The intervention will have a number of components that have been derived from empirically tested methods, but have been designed to incorporate both pan-Indian and Siletz-specific cultural values. These components include the following: (1) an intake interview designed to elicit specific areas of family concern and increase motivation to participate in subsequent prevention activities; (2) a Native American parenting curriculum; (3) a classroom curriculum linked in content to the parenting materials; and (4) the use of paraprofessional home visitors and wraparound funding to increase service utilization and coordination. The intervention is based on a community empowerment model (Ball, Ball, & Fisher, 1996; Fisher, Storck, & Bacon, 1997), which specifies a process by which Tribes assume an active role in prevention research. The project will be conducted over a five-year period, and it is expected to involve approximately 270 families at the Siletz Tribal Head Start Sites in Portland, Salem, Siletz, and Springfield, OR. The intervention will employ a multiple baseline design, in which data are gathered across intervals both prior to and after implementing the intervention, and effectiveness is evaluated by a change in slope or intercept of the data from baseline to intervention. Change will be evaluated across four domains of family functioning: parenting practices, child adjustment, parent adjustment, and service utilization. In addition, data gathered will allow for consideration of (a) the relationship between intervention dosage and families' response, (b) the adequacy for Native American communities of a parent-mediated model of family outcomes, and an examination of the temporal sequence of change among different domains of family functioning as a result of the intervention.
| Fisher, Philip A; Ball, Thomas J (2005) Balancing empiricism and local cultural knowledge in the design of prevention research. J Urban Health 82:iii44-55 |
| Fisher, Philip A; Ball, Thomas J (2003) Tribal participatory research: mechanisms of a collaborative model. Am J Community Psychol 32:207-16 |
| Leonard, Sherry; Gault, Judith; Hopkins, Jan et al. (2002) Association of promoter variants in the alpha7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor subunit gene with an inhibitory deficit found in schizophrenia. Arch Gen Psychiatry 59:1085-96 |
| Fisher, Philip A; Ball, Thomas J (2002) The Indian Family Wellness project: an application of the tribal participatory research model. Prev Sci 3:235-40 |
| Fisher, P A; Gunnar, M R; Chamberlain, P et al. (2000) Preventive intervention for maltreated preschool children: impact on children's behavior, neuroendocrine activity, and foster parent functioning. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 39:1356-64 |
