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Our focus is on families with children with autism living in under-resourced contexts who must navigate the complex world of evaluations, diagnoses, interventions and resources. Over the next 5 years, our AIR-B team will conduct research, develop tools, and disseminate information into the community.
For both studies, we will work with local community partners, regional centers, school districts, and parents of children with ASD.
Our team has already started to work on these projects. We held a community conference of over 250 community members in South Los Angeles in November 2015 to increase autism awareness and share information with the community. Additionally, the research team participated in an intensive training in community engagement to ensure the bidirectional sharing of information. We gained important feedback on our proposed studies and will continue to obtain community input through focus groups and interviews over the next several months. We look forward to collaborating with our diverse communities to learn more about how to bring evidence supported interventions to families and children with ASD and particularly to those with the most unmet need.
A central part of our mission has been to broaden the diversity of research participants and contexts. The adoption of Community Partnered Participatory Research (CPPR) methods from our Healthy African American Families, HAAF partners, will help facilitate the development and adoption of interventions that have the most potential to effectively change practice and sustain over time. Through CPPR, we are able to expand our research into areas of the community that were not yet accessible to us.
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