Lessons learned from adaptation and evaluation of home visitation services for Latino communities

Cultural adaptation of child abuse and neglect prevention services facilitates building community's capacity to address this critical public health concern. Adapting evidencebased services and systematically examining the extent to which it enhances receptivity and responsiveness by improved cultural congruence is not straightforward, due to the diversity and idiosyncrasy of the targeted at-risk populations. The objective of this chapter is to share the challenges and lessons learned from our collaboration with a local Latino community agency to adapt an evidence-based home visitation program. Areas of challenges and lessons learned during the feasibility phase of the project included but were not limited to: language diversity, literacy issues, recruitment of bi-lingual providers and training thereafter, lack of standardized measures, data collection, management, evaluation procedures and process issues. The lessons learned from these undertakings underscored the importance of taking time to create a culturally sensitive and congruent approach to service provision and evaluation. Our experiences and lessons learned offer some insights for program practice, implementation, and research.