Assessing Hispanic mental health needs: issues and recommendations

This article is based on the premise that culture-specific needs assessment methodologies are necessary to obtain accurate, valid, and reliable results when studies are conducted in culturally different groups. Accordingly, the literature on needs assessment and on Hispanic psychology is reviewed, creating a synthesis prescriptive of the best strategies for the assessment of mental health needs of Hispanic populations. Traditional needs assessment methods are discussed in the context of the types of changes that must be made to render them culturally acceptable and useful with Hispanics. Conceptually, the important issue is that of being sensitive to the interplay between the effectiveness of the methodology and its impact within a given cultural setting.