"When Will Your Program Be Available in Spanish?" Adapting an Early Parenting Intervention for Latino Families

This paper describes the Spanish adaptation of PACE-Parenting Our Children to Excellence. Successfully offered in preschools and daycare centers since 2002, PACE is a research-based preventive intervention to support families in their parenting task through discussions and activities that address practical childrearing issues and promote child coping-competence. Developed in response to community calls, the new program is known as CANNE -Criando a Nuestros Niños hacia el Éxito. The paper makes the processes linking original and adapted versions explicit by accounting for the conceptual and practical decisions that were made as CANNE was being developed. We begin by summarizing the challenges of adapting and translating a behavioral intervention, and by describing the coping-competence model that informs both versions of the program. We turn then to a detailed account of the adaptation itself and of its results. Specifically, we describe: (a) the consultation process at the origin of this adaptation, (b) the adaptation of the manual and the steps taken to establish the extent to which the English and Spanish versions correspond (adaptation fidelity), and (c) the translation of the manual and the cross-language comparison of measures to demonstrate that they yield comparable data when administered in English and Spanish.