The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA

Abstract #39107

Rebeca Cerna, Charity Cason, MS, Cynthia Peck, and Gabriela Jones. Educational & Community Initiatives, WestEd, 801 Parkcenter Dr., Suite 110, Santa Ana, CA 92701, 714-972-5900, rcerna@wested.org

Creciendo Saludable is an elementary school-based program designed to prevent and/or delay the development of health and behavioral problems in Latino school-aged youth. Participants involved in this longitudinal study face challenges everyday of language barriers, high levels of poverty, high transience and immigration issues. The study requires the completion of repeated measures across time with parents of referred students. This poses the challenge of preventing attrition to maintain high levels of participation. Several limitations, both anticipated and unanticipated have occurred while conducting the face-to-face, interview-style parent surveys. The parent questionnaire is a compilation of several instruments and subscales, which can take between 30 to 45 minutes to complete, depending on participant literacy and comprehension. To date over 1000 baseline measures, 600 6-month measures, 250 12-month measures, and 100 24-month measures have been completed by implementing various effective strategies in working with this Latino population. This paper will examine the parent measures of Creciendo Saludable, the challenges presented, and strategies implemented to increase participant response rates.

Learning Objectives: Session participants will be able to

• Identify methodological issues and limitations which affect data collection with a transient Spanish speaking population;
• Idenity various effective strategies to address these limitations.

Keywords: Latino, Data Collection

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.