Collaborative Family Program Development: Research Methods That Investigate and Foster Resilience and Engagement in Marginalized Communities

Programs and interventions for marginalized communities are typically created and evaluated by academics from their “expert position,” relying heavily on quantitative assessments, and based on what is already known about the community’s challenges from previous research. This approach fails to incorporate members’ detailed expertise on their own lives and their ideas about what would make a program useful. As a result, these programs fail to enroll many families, because they do not recognize families’ self-perceived needs and constraints around attending such programs. This chapter describes the ten-step Collaborative Family Program Development (CFPD) model for engaging families as experts in teaching researchers about their unique challenges and in creating and evaluating programs to serve families’ needs. The steps include (1) forming collaborative professional relationships and engaging senior mentors as cultural and methodological consultants, (2) intensive interviewing of family members, (3) intensive interviewing of agency professionals, (4) phrase-by-phrase qualitative coding, (5) creating program formats and contents and writing an initial manual, (6) piloting of the program with session-by-session evaluations by participants, (7) revising the program and manual based on ongoing interviews and families’ evaluations, (8) intensive interviewing of families for each subsequent group cycle, (9) evaluating the effectiveness of the program through traditional mixed methods in matched comparison or randomized designs, and (10) disseminating and adapting program to other settings. The CFPD approach was created to develop and evaluate a program to foster resilience in families living in homeless shelters but is applicable to program development for any community with any particular challenges.