Community-Based, Caregiver-Implemented Early Language Intervention in High-Risk Families: Lessons Learned.

Abstract

High-quality, early caregiver-child interaction facilitates language, cognitive, and health outcomes. Children in low socioeconomic status households experience less frequent and lower-quality language interactions on average than their middle to high socioeconomic status peers. Early caregiver-implemented intervention may help to improve outcomes for these children. This article describes how we used community-based participatory research (CBPR) to develop and implement a community-based, caregiver-implemented early language intervention, including the challenges, solutions, and lessons learned in the process of CBPR. We adopted an ethnographic approach to document and analyze our CBPR experiences in multiple phases of the project, including intervention design, training, implementation, and evaluation. Developing the CBPR partnership, co-designing and implementing the study, and managing systems- level concerns like obtaining funding were central challenges for the researcher-community team. The CBPR model enhances early language intervention research by facilitating understanding of families in underserved communities and increasing the cultural relevancy of intervention materials.