A CBPR Approach to Capacity Building among Latino Migrant Workers to Prevent HIV

Grant Winners

Deans

Abstract

While the Latino community living in the United States has been disproportionately impacted by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, prevention efforts targeting Latinos lag behind those targeting other communities. This public health gap is even more evident when considering the sparse attention received by Latino migrant workers (LMWs) in the U.S. despite their high risk for HIV infection. The development of new interventions to address HIV prevention in Latino migrant communities needs to take into account their specific circumstances as well as their traditional mistrust of conventional research which they view as paternalistic and irrelevant to their needs. Consequently, culturally adapted interventions must prompt community engagement and participation at every phase of the program if they do not want to remain culturally blind. Community based participatory research (CBPR) has emerged as a research paradigm that addresses the limitations of conventional research models and offers a collaborative approach to research that equitably involves all partners in the research process and recognizes the unique strengths that each brings. CBPR is rapidly becoming a dominant research paradigm in the field of behavioral research. However, lack of research capacity at the community level remains one of the main barriers to establishing successful CBPR partnerships with LMWs. The purpose of this proposal is to build research capacity among LMWs in South Florida by (1) creating a dialogue with key community partners and community members with the goal of identifying what type of knowledge and skills would be necessary to address the issue of HIV prevention among LMWs; (2) using the knowledge acquired through that dialogue to develop a CBPR training curriculum; and (3) pilot testing the training curriculum to educate community members on various fundamental aspects of HIV prevention related research such as community outreach and education, data collection, and findings dissemination.