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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

SO504

“We all agree on this”: from participation to partnership in the cultural adaptation of a family-based intervention

“WE ARE ALL PARTICIPATING IN THIS”: FROM PARTICIPATION TO PARTNERSHIP IN THE CULTURAL ADAPTATION OF A FAMILY-BASED INTERVENTION.

Authentic cultural adaptation of a family-based intervention with asylum-seeking families emerges through interrelated active ingredients: sustained relational depth, facilitator flexibility, and participatory co-ownership.

The aim is to identify the active ingredients that enable the authentic and participatory cultural adaptation of a trauma-informed, family-based intervention with families seeking asylum in Montreal. Using a participatory qualitative design, the researchers worked for two years with the Asylum Seekers Advisory Committee (ASAC), comprising asylum-seeking parents. The committee consisted of 5 members recruited through community organizations. Data were collected from field notes from 6 adaptation sessions and interviews with co-researchers about their experiences of adaptation and participation, and were analyzed using inductive and deductive thematic content analysis (ethics approval: CIUSSS Centre Ouest de l'Ile de Montreal, no. 2021-2461). Adaptation targets were defined according to the eight dimensions of the Ecological Validity Model: language, persons, metaphors, content, concepts, goals, methods, and context. The findings identified three active ingredients: the authentic partnership and relational depth established through two years of collaboration, creating a safe environment in which participants could share personal experiences and pressing concerns; facilitator flexibility and responsiveness, expressed through prioritizing participants' immediate distress rather than rigidly adhering to a predetermined agenda; and participatory co-ownership, through which parents' experiences directly shaped the intervention content and surrounding care practices. Co-ownership also involved reframing identity, transforming refugee status from a passive label into an active source of resilience and expertise. Factors constraining the process and the solutions implemented were as follows: language-based subgroups and bilingual facilitators to address the slower pace and limited peer solidarity in trilingual sessions (English, French, and Spanish); an increased number of sessions and additional discussion time to accommodate complex experiences that could not be adequately addressed within the allotted session time; ongoing discussion of lived experience as the primary source of expertise to address the methodological tension between Participatory Action Research and traditional top-down approaches to parent education; and the addition of expressive arts methods to address the limitations that culturally neutral tools imposed on in-depth cultural critique. In conclusion, authentic cultural adaptation is generated through interacting components that sustain trust, responsiveness, and shared ownership; this framework provides a foundation for designing scalable and culturally responsive interventions for displaced communities.

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