This revised proposal, Developing Locally-Tailored Prevention Programming for Children of Incarcerated Mothers, uses a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach to tailor and deliver an existing selective prevention program (Kumpfer's Strengthening Families Program) to promote mental health and prevent behavior disorders among 5- to 11-year-old children whose mothers have been incarcerated. Children of incarcerated mothers are at very high risk for mental health problems, academic failure, and future criminal offenses, which are both individual and public health problems given that the number of such children is estimated as over 200,000 and increasing rapidly (Bureau of Justice, 2005). Existing evidence-based interventions do not specifically address the children's unique needs, or the needs of the overburdened and often ill- prepared caregivers responsible for the children whose mothers are incarcerated. Locally tailoring empirically-based interventions based on community and participant input has been suggested as a promising direction for prevention research, and may be the best way to help hard-to-reach families like these because families are more likely to be engaged and participate when the program is culturally accepted and responds to community needs (Kumpfer et al. 2002a). The University of Michigan School of Public Health and the Prevention Research Center of Michigan (PRC/MI) have formed a partnership with Motherly Intercession, a community-based organization in Flint, Michigan that serves children of incarcerated mothers and their caregivers, with the goal of using CPBR methods to adapt this model prevention program to address the needs of this population, and implement and evaluate the program in a community setting. This project is a collaborative effort whereby community and university partners have contributed to and will continue to inform the planning, design, writing, and budget plan of the project. Goals for the R21 period are to locally tailor and implement the Strengthening Families Program (SFP) to meet community needs. We will: 1) use focus groups to solicit caregiver concerns and issues about family and child needs, and tailor SFP to incorporate concerns of families with an incarcerated mother;2) build our community partner's organizational capacity to implement and sustain the adapted intervention and participate in research by forming a community advisory board, training local staff, and building data management systems;and 3) deliver and evaluate effects of the adapted intervention on child and caregiver mental health outcomes in a pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT). We will collect process data to document our adaptation methods and to inform implementation strategies for delivering the locally-adapted program on a larger scale.
| Miller, Alison L; Weston, Lauren E; Perryman, Jamie et al. (2014) Parenting While Incarcerated: Tailoring the Strengthening Families Program for Use with Jailed Mothers. Child Youth Serv Rev 44:163-170 |
| Miller, Alison L; Perryman, Jamie; Markovitz, Lara et al. (2013) Strengthening Incarcerated Families: Evaluating a Pilot Program for Children of Incarcerated Parents and Their Caregivers. Fam Relat 62: |
| Miller, Alison L; Krusky, Allison M; Franzen, Susan et al. (2012) Partnering to translate evidence-based programs to community settings: bridging the gap between research and practice. Health Promot Pract 13:559-66 |
