Cultural Adaptation of Promising, Evidence-Based, and Best Practices: a Scoping Literature Review.

This scoping literature review of nearly 5,000 peer-reviewed articles from myriad disciplines examines usage of two sets of terms that are common to many researchers, but arcane to many practitioners. Aiming to inform researchers about how scholarly literature that invokes these terms might speak to practitioners, and resulting implications for practice, we review scholarly use of three practice designations (promising, evidence-based, best) and five cultural considerations for those practices (adaptation, competence, modification, responsiveness, specificity). In addition to scoping review methods, we apply social cartography and definitional traces. Findings drive our contention that "promising practice" is the designation that might provide practitioners with the most utility, rather than the frequent-often-unarticulated-uses of best and evidence-based. Likewise, we find copious evidence of cultural considerations being invoked without operationalization. Social cartography reveals few international partnerships and limited domestic leadership among 'leading' research institutions regarding the intersection of practice designations and cultural considerations. Themes from the definitional trace prompt us to invite scholarly debate about a ladder from 'promising' to 'evidence-based' to 'best' and to prompt researchers' efforts to transfer knowledge to practitioners.

A tale of two measures: Concordance between the ARSMA-II and the BIQ acculturation scales among Latino immigrant families.

Acculturation refers to the extent to which an individual immigrant (or immigrant group) acquires the customs and characteristics of a new receiving society and/or retains the customs and characteristics of the person's or group's cultural heritage. Different acculturation measures are often assumed to be interchangeable, although this assumption is rarely tested empirically. The purpose of the present study was to examine the overlap between 2 commonly used measures of acculturation among individuals of Latino/Hispanic ancestry in the United States, the Acculturation Rating Scale for Mexican Americans II (ARSMA-II) and the Bicultural Involvement Questionnaire-Short Version (BIQ-S). Specifically, we examined the ways in which scores from the 2 measures relate to one another, as well as similarities versus differences in the ways they predict external variables of interest (e.g., family functioning, parenting, and youth adjustment) that acculturation is known to influence. Findings indicate distinct patterns of results for the 2 measures. For instance, though the BIQ-S focuses entirely on language use and other cultural practices, the ARSMA-II more consistently relates to language variables. Further, adolescent BIQ-S cultural heritage scores related negatively to risks for and engagement in alcohol use-supporting prior findings-whereas ARSMA-II scores were unrelated to alcohol use. Given the largely nonoverlapping set of relationships of the BIQ-S and the ARSMA-II subscale scores with measures of language dominance and conflict, measures of parenting, and measures of youth outcomes, we recommend that studies utilize both of these measures to fully appraise acculturation in this population. (PsycINFO Database Record