Challenges and strategies for conducting intervention research with culturally diverse populations.

Conducting intervention research with culturally diverse, underserved, and often hard to reach populations in naturalistic or field settings presents investigators with a number of practical challenges. This article describes four special challenges and strategies for dealing with them that clients, service providers, and researchers experienced in conducting a prevention intervention to reduce substance use and sexual risky behaviors with low-income Latina young women. The challenges are (a) building community partnerships; (b) developing interventions that are acceptable and relevant; (c) promoting successful recruitment, participation, and retention of participants; and (d) developing a diverse, cohesive, and committed research team and effective managerial information support systems.

From theory to practice: community health nursing in a public health neighborhood team.

An interdisciplinary team in a local public health district tested its ability to implement the core public health functions of assessment, policy development, and assurance by changing its practice to a community-driven model of building partnerships for health with groups and communities in a designated locale. Evaluation of this innovation revealed that the public health nurse members of the team enacted their community health nursing knowledge to strengthen agency to cocreate health. Interdisciplinary collaboration was essential to the team's community mobilization efforts. Additional findings suggested that this organizational innovation was associated with developing a more participatory organizational climate, increasing system effectiveness, and building community capacity.