Cultural and Linguistic Adaptation of the “Coping Together” Intervention

Families can face stressful periods, and this is especially true of immigrant families who often have to navigate multiple cultures and languages, which can bring about additional strain and conflict. These stressors are often compounded in neighborhoods that are already experiencing other stressors such as poverty, neighborhood violence, gang activity, discrimination, and lack of access to family healthcare services. Research has demonstrated that living within these social conditions can negatively impact the wellbeing of families, most importantly children.

To address this need, our collaborators at Duke University developed the “Coping Together” intervention, which is a family-based approache to reach adults and children together in ways that consider family-level strengths and stressors. This approach moves beyond traditional individual therapy approaches to maximize the benefit for families. The basic idea is that family-based interventions have the potential to improve family functioning, and therefore improve child and caregiver mental health.

With the goal of ensuring the “Coping Together” is relevant and appropriate for Latino families, our team has partnered with Dr. Eve Puffer (Duke) to conduct a rigorous cultural and linguistic adaptation of the intervention levering community engagement, human-centered design, and implementation science.

“Coping Together” is a strengths-based approach that allows families to come together to build family visions and offers skills that can help reach those goals. This intervention has already demonstrated a range of promising outcomes: 

• High acceptability among youths and caregivers
• High performance and fidelity of delivery
• Improved communication skills
• Improved relationship closeness
• Increased hope among youth