The Latino Youth and Family Empowerment Study-III (LYFE-III) is designed to adapt and pilot test Nuestras Familias: Andando Entre Culturas, a culturally adapted, evidence-based parenting intervention for Latino families. Nuestras Familias integrates principles from parent management training, social learning theory, and ecodevelopmental theory. The program is intended to strengthen parenting practices that may protect against mental and behavioral health problems among Latino youth.
The study consists of two stages. During the first stage, the existing intervention will be adapted from a group-based, in-person format to a self-guided online format. The digital program will preserve the intervention's core parenting components while making the content more accessible and reducing the time and logistical demands associated with attending in-person sessions. Latino parents and community stakeholders will participate in an iterative user-centered refinement process to evaluate the program's cultural relevance, usability, clarity, and technological accessibility. Feedback from successive focus groups will be used to revise and finalize the digital intervention and its accompanying online manual.
The digital intervention will address parental involvement, monitoring, positive reinforcement and skill encouragement, appropriate and consistent discipline, family communication, and family problem solving. It will also address experiences relevant to Latino families, including familismo, respeto, parent-youth differences in acculturation, family and gender roles, language barriers, discrimination, and structural barriers affecting families. Program content will include brief presentations, demonstrations and video-based role plays, interactive activities, summaries of key concepts, and opportunities for parents to practice parenting strategies at home. Parents will proceed through the program sequentially and will receive access to new content on a weekly basis. An online discussion forum, periodic program-related messages, progress tracking, and contact with the research team will be used to support engagement.
During the second stage, the refined intervention will be evaluated in a randomized pilot trial. Participating families will be randomly assigned to receive either the LYFE-III online parenting intervention or services as usual through the collaborating community organization. Families assigned to services as usual will retain access to the organization's customary resources but will not receive LYFE-III during the trial. They will be offered access to the intervention after completion of study activities.
Parents and youth will complete online assessments before the intervention, at the end of the approximately four-month intervention period, and three months after the intervention ends. The pilot is intended to evaluate the feasibility, acceptability, appropriateness, engagement, and initial promise of delivering the culturally adapted intervention online. It will also estimate intervention-related changes in parenting practices and youth mental and behavioral health and examine whether changes in parenting practices are associated with subsequent changes in youth outcomes. Findings will be used to refine the intervention and its implementation procedures and to inform a future, larger-scale effectiveness trial.
