The proposed study seeks to investigate the cross-cultural equivalence of existing family measures among three cultural groups, Vietnamese, Cambodian and Anglo-American. As recently noted in the Research Meeting on Drug Abuse Prevention through Family Interventions (NIDA Research Monograph, in press), there are several characteristics which should be considered when selecting measures of parenting practices. These include the culture, language and social class of the population. While there has been growing attention and awareness of the need for culturally appropriate measures, there has been little done to examine the reliability and validity of such measures among diverse minority populations. This proposal seeks to augment an existing pilot study which has begun a process to examine the cultural relevance among these groups. Funds from this proposal will allow for data collection targeting Vietnamese families and broaden the existing study's focus from a two group to three group comparison. Data from this additional Southeast Asian population will allow for a comparison between two groups which share common characteristics yet have different cultural bases; therefore the results will provide more information regarding generalizability of the measures. In addition to providing information regarding the specific measures among the target populations, the study will outline a process to examine the issue of cultural relevance which can be utilized to examine other cultural groups and measurement issues.
