National partners sought for Hmong and Somali screening pilot

Foundations for Success is seeking agencies to partner with us in a national pilot for making an electronic version of an early childhood mental health screening tool available to Hmong and Somali families.

For the past five years, Foundations for Success has worked with the publishers and authors of the Ages and Stages Questionnaire: Social Emotional to develop culturally appropriate versions of the tool in Hmong and Somali, two large immigrant populations in Ramsey County, Minnesota.

Thus far, we have translated the tool using a front and back translation and then reviewed the translations using committees of native Hmong and Somali speakers. During this process, we updated some of the direct translations to be more culturally relevant and created audio versions of the tools for families who do not read their native Hmong or Somali languages.

As a result of these changes, we want to expand our pilot to further assess the reliability and validity of the tool.

We are interested in expanding our work from Ramsey County, Minnesota, to other geographic areas throughout the United States who serve large populations of Hmong and Somali families with children ages 0 to 5.

Partner agencies will help to test and ensure that:

• the questions within the tools are culturally relevant for Hmong and Somali families.
• the tools are correctly identifying Hmong and Somali children ages 0 to 5 with social emotional concerns.
• the audio/electronic administration of the tools is easily understood by families.
• the audio/electronic administration of the tools is useful and convenient for screeners.

The pilot is expected to last from May 1, 2009, to September 30, 2009.

Agencies who are interested should contact Catherine Wright at cwright@caprw.org.