Family Listening Program: Multi-Tribal Implementation and Evaluation

January 28, 2025 updated by: University of New Mexico
This is a five-year R01 effectiveness trial where tribal partners are committed to assessing the Family Listening/Circle Program's effectiveness and disseminating the approach and intervention within Indian Country as a best practice in reducing substance abuse health disparities.Three specific aims of the grant are 1) To rigorously test effectiveness of FLCP; with a comparative longitudinal design within and across the tribes, with 4th graders to prevent substance initiation/use and strengthen families; 2) Through CBPR, support TRTs to transform their research capacities into local prevention research infrastructures and partnering; 3)To assess additional program effects on other health/education programs and leadership within the tribes. In sum, this multi-tribal/academic partnership builds on accomplishments to test the effectiveness of an innovative intervention. This grant provides an unparalleled opportunity to reduce substance abuse in three tribal communities, strengthen tribal research capacities, and impact substance abuse prevention research designs nationally, by illustrating how CBPR processes can integrate evidence-based and cultural-centered practices to create effective programs that generate community ownership and sustainability.

Study Overview

Status

Completed

Conditions

Intervention / Treatment

Detailed Description

With substance abuse concerns plaguing tribal communities, health preventive approaches for American Indian (AI) children need urgent attention. Mainstream programs fall short by failing to speak to AI children on their own terms. Not so with the Family Listening/Circle Program (FL/CP) which integrates an evidence-based family-strengthening core, with cultural values and practices for 4th graders, their parents and elders. Through previous Native American Research Centers for Health funding (Indian Health Service & National Institutes of Health partnership) the FL/CP was created and piloted by community-based participatory research (CBPR) partnerships between the University of New Mexico Center for Participatory Research and three tribal communities: Pueblo of Jemez, Ramah Band of Navajo and Mescalero Apache Nation. FL/CP fills a gap in substance abuse prevention by recapturing historic traditions of cultural transmission, such as family dinner story-telling where elders connect with children, supporting enhanced child-family communication and psycho-social coping through traditional dialogue, indigenous languages and empowerment where children and families create community action projects addressing community substance abuse. With initial FL/CP pilot and feasibility research completed, Tribal Research Teams (TRTs) from the Pueblo of Jemez, Ramah Band of Navajo and Mescalero Apache Nation are now in place for full program implementation and effectiveness testing through a longitudinal quasi-experimental design involving a long-term, multi-tribal/academic research partnership. Under this five-year R01 effectiveness trial, tribal partners are committed to assessing the program's effectiveness and disseminating the approach and intervention within Indian Country as a best practice in reducing substance abuse health disparities, with TRTs collaborating on all research activities, implementation, interpretation/analysis, and dissemination plans. Three specific aims are 1) To rigorously test effectiveness of FLCP; with a comparative longitudinal design within and across the tribes, with 4th graders to prevent substance initiation/use and strengthen families; 2) Through CBPR, support TRTs to transform their research capacities into local prevention research infrastructures and partnering; 3)To assess additional program effects on other health/education programs and leadership within the tribes. In sum, this multi-tribal/academic partnership builds on accomplishments to test the effectiveness of an innovative intervention. This grant provides an unparalleled opportunity to reduce substance abuse in three tribal communities, strengthen tribal research capacities, and impact substance abuse prevention research designs nationally, by illustrating how CBPR processes can integrate evidence-based and cultural-centered practices to create effective programs that generate community ownership and sustainability.

Study Type

Interventional

Enrollment (Actual)

266

Phase

  • Not Applicable

Contacts and Locations

This section provides the contact details for those conducting the study, and information on where this study is being conducted.

Study Locations

  • United States
    • New Mexico
      • Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico, United States, 87024
        • Pueblo of Jemez Department of Education
      • Mescalero, New Mexico, United States, 88340
        • Mescalero Prevention Program
      • Pinehill, New Mexico, United States, 87357
        • Ramah Navajo School Board

Participation Criteria

Researchers look for people who fit a certain description, called eligibility criteria. Some examples of these criteria are a person's general health condition or prior treatments.

Eligibility Criteria

Ages Eligible for Study

8 years to 11 years (Child)

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Description

Inclusion Criteria: Inclusion criteria includes any families from Mescalero Apache, Jemez Pueblo and Ramah Navajo with a fourth and fifth-grade child and their parents or guardian, and grandparents who will volunteer to participate. Only children's data are analyzed.

-

Exclusion Criteria:Those whom are ineligible in this study are: those that do not give consent and/or assent to participate; those that do not identify as tribal members of Mescalero Apache, Jemez Pueblo and Ramah Navajo or as the family member of someone that identifies as Mescalero Apache, Jemez Pueblo and Ramah Navajo; children and that are not in the targeted range of fourth and fifth grade.

-

Study Plan

This section provides details of the study plan, including how the study is designed and what the study is measuring.

How is the study designed?

Design Details

  • Primary Purpose: Prevention
  • Allocation: Non-Randomized
  • Interventional Model: Parallel Assignment
  • Masking: None (Open Label)

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm
Intervention / Treatment
Experimental: Program group
Tribal Research Team members recruit participants by sending letters home with the fourth and fifth grade children. This letter provides an overview of the FL/CP and invite interested parents and children to learn more. TRT and UNM team members follow-up with interested parents individually. If families are committed to being a part of FL/CP, a meeting is set to conduct the informed consent process and complete pretest. Families in the program group then attend FL/CP sessions which covers the intergenerational culturally adapted curriculum. Program families also participate in various aspects of the program including completing a Community Action Project.
Other: Intergenerational culturally adapted curriculum
Each session starts with a collective dinner with families eating together. Then practice their Indian and clan names. The sessions are led by facilitators in their own language or bilingually. The facilitators then divide the families into children and adult groups to address the theme of the session, and they then return together at the end of the session to share their learnings. The sessions always end with the children and adults writing in their journals which are individual pages that they then put in their curriculum binders. Families are then given their "home practice," which is a task that the families do together during the intervening week. The facilitators collect the curriculum binders after each session to bring back to the families the next week.
No Intervention: Comparison group
Upon receiving the letter families that selected not to participate or who decline to participate will be invited to take part in the research study as comparison participants. Comparison participants do not attend the FL/CP sessions and only complete the pre, post and 1 year post tests.

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Child Well-being
Time Frame: post-test (2-4 months after intervention)
Self-report measures of anxiety, Anxiety Panic/GAD Sub-Scale, average change from baseline (pre-program participation). Anxiety Items coded are coded 1-4. The scale was calculated as the arithmetic average of items, which results in a minimum value of 1 and a maximum value of 4. Lower scores are better. The Panic/GAD sub-scale was the average of three items with the same min/max as the full scale. Children surveyed at pre-test, post-test (2-4 months after intervention), and one-year post intervention.
post-test (2-4 months after intervention)

Secondary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Child Well-being
Time Frame: Post-post survey: One year after the intervention
Self-report measures of depression, change from baseline at one-year, Depression scale items were coded 1 to 3, and the arithmetic mean of 26 items was used to compute the scale. The scale has a minimum of 1.0 and a maximum of 3.0 with higher values be better, i.e. lower levels of depression.
Post-post survey: One year after the intervention

Collaborators and Investigators

This is where you will find people and organizations involved with this study.

Sponsor

University of New Mexico

Investigators

  • Principal Investigator: Lorenda Belone, PhD, University of New Mexico
  • Principal Investigator: Nina Wallerstein, DrPH, University of New Mexico

Publications and helpful links

The person responsible for entering information about the study voluntarily provides these publications. These may be about anything related to the study.

General Publications

Study record dates

These dates track the progress of study record and summary results submissions to ClinicalTrials.gov. Study records and reported results are reviewed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to make sure they meet specific quality control standards before being posted on the public website.

Study Major Dates

Study Start (Actual)

April 1, 2014

Primary Completion (Actual)

March 31, 2019

Study Completion (Actual)

March 31, 2019

Study Registration Dates

First Submitted

May 3, 2017

First Submitted That Met QC Criteria

May 3, 2017

First Posted (Actual)

May 5, 2017

Study Record Updates

Last Update Posted (Actual)

March 25, 2025

Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria

January 28, 2025

Last Verified

January 1, 2025

More Information

Terms related to this study

Keywords

Additional Relevant MeSH Terms

Other Study ID Numbers

  • 14-289

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?

NO

Drug and device information, study documents

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product

No

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product

No

This information was retrieved directly from the website clinicaltrials.gov without any changes. If you have any requests to change, remove or update your study details, please contact register@clinicaltrials.gov. As soon as a change is implemented on clinicaltrials.gov, this will be updated automatically on our website as well.

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