The development of a culturally relevant preventive intervention

Researchers often publish the numerical findings of their intervention studies while overlooking the experiential findings that could help promote more appropriate and effective interventions in the future. The present paper describes the process by which we developed a culturally relevant preventive intervention for Korean American adolescents aged 11 to 14 years and their parents. We discuss the main findings of a series of pilot studies and demonstrated how lessons learned from each study guided the development process and informed the research that followed. Program development is an iterative process that incorporates feedback from study participants. Cultural relevance is ensured when participants’ voices are reflected in the program development, implementation, and evaluation process. The final outcome of the development process was the preventive intervention improving parent-child relationships, increasing parental knowledge, enhancing parental selfefficacy, and decreasing parental stress among Korean American parents, and ultimately promoting Korean American adolescents’ mental health. The specific aims of this two-group, repeated-measures, controlled randomized study were to test the feasibility of the PRIDE (Promoting Intergenerational Dialogue about Emotional Problems) intervention and to compare its efficacy with an attention control (AC) group regarding parental knowledge, parental and filial self-efficacy, parent-child (P-C) communication, P-C conflicts, and P-C satisfaction.