The ultimate goal of this Mentored Career Development Award (K01) is to provide the applicant with the skills to establish an independent program of research focused on developing and testing culturally responsive interventions for young minority children. The immediate research goal of this award is to modify Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), an efficacious intervention for young behavior-disordered children (age 2-7), to be more culturally responsive to Mexican American families. The award will allow the applicant to build on a strong foundation of research training in developmental psychopathology and cultural factors in mental health treatment, as well as an extensive clinical background in behavioral treatments with Mexican American children. The proposed training goals provide additional instruction and mentoring in (1} intervention development and the conduct of clinical trials; (2) assessment of culture; (3) methods for translating efficacious interventions into effectiveness trials; and (4) longitudinal data analysis for clinical trials. The research plan for this award is divided into two phases that will be implemented with the support of the training described above. First, the PCIT intervention will be modified to be culturally appropriate and tested for feasibility with a small number (N=5) of Mexican American children with behavior disorders. Second, a pilot effectiveness trial comparing Modified PCIT to Standard PCIT will be conducted with 50 Mexican American families presenting for treatment of disruptive behavior disorders at a community clinic. The results of the final phase will provide preliminary data on whether culturally based modifications to treatments can improve outcomes and will provide a model for the cultural modification of treatments for a range of ethnic minority groups. The data will also provide an estimate of effect size that will be used to determine the necessary sample size for a larger effectiveness trial in the future.
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