The applicant is requesting five years of funding through the Scientist Development Award for New Minority Faculty (K01) program to: 1) develop expertise in the translation, implementation and testing of clinically efficacious interventions into community settings; and 2) develop expertise in culturally adapting and testing those interventions to ensure successful dissemination within inner-city African American communities. The applicant's academic, research, and clinical training provide an excellent foundation for this work. The proposed training will focus on gaining effectiveness research skills with respect to child mental health treatment and prevention, and on examining the impact of child, family and contextual characteristics related to race, ethnicity and culture on the effective implementation of empirically-supported interventions. The research plan includes three phases: Phase 1: a) operationalize key constructs targeted for change; b) develop and manualize the culturally-specific parent training program; and c) develop an assessment battery to evaluate change in key constructs, to assess treatment integrity and to assess consumer satisfaction (Year 1); Phase 2: conduct an open pilot study of the intervention (Year 2); and Phase 3: conduct a randomized controlled pilot study (Years 3 and 4). These studies are considered critical preliminary steps to the design of a full- scale effectiveness trial (an RO1 grant application will be submitted in Year 5). The ultimate goal for this career development program is to acquire the necessary skills to develop and disseminate culturally-relevant, theoretically-based, rigorously tested, and generalizable, interventions for preventing and treating mental health problems.
