Development of a Culturally Specific Family Approach

Applying BSFT to Hispanic families revealed how profoundly the process of immigration and acculturation could affect the family and each member. To meet this challenge, an intervention was specifically designed to address the special stressors and clinical problems faced by this population.

Bicultural Effectiveness Training

The Center for Family Studies developed the bicultural effectiveness training intervention to enhance bicultural skills in all family members. Bicultural effectiveness training is specifically designed to ameliorate the acculturation-related stresses confronted by two-generation immigrant families (Szapocznik et al., 1984).

A clinical trial¹ investigated the relative effectiveness of bicultural effectiveness training in comparison with BSFT (Szapocznik, Santisteban, et al., 1986b) in improving behavior problems in early adolescence and family functioning. (Drug-abusing adolescents were excluded from this study because they were considered beyond the reach of the intervention.) The results of this study indicated that bicultural effectiveness training was as effective as structural family therapy in improving adolescent and family functioning. These findings suggested that bicultural effectiveness training could accomplish the goals of family therapy while focusing on the cultural content that made the therapy attractive to Hispanic families.

Family Effectiveness Training

Subsequently, BSFT and bicultural effectiveness training were combined into a package called family effectiveness training (Szapocznik, Santisteban, et al., 1986a). A study² investigated the value of family effectiveness training as a prevention/intervention strategy for Hispanic families of children ages 6-11 who presented emotional and behavioral problems (Szapocznik, Santisteban, et al., 1989). The results of this study indicated that families in the family effectiveness training treatment group showed significantly greater improvement than did control families on measures of family functioning, problem behaviors, and child self-concept. Thus, the intervention was able to improve both child and family functioning. The improvements were still in effect at 6-month followup.

Multicultural Effectiveness Training

Recently, the cultural context in Miami has become more complex. When bicultural effectiveness training and family effectiveness training were developed in the 1970's, the targeted Cuban-born families lived in a cultural context that was dominated by Cuban immigrants and Caucasian Americans. However, by the 1990's, Miami included Cuban Americans, Cuban immigrants, Caucasian Americans, Latin Americans from nearly all countries in the Western Hemisphere, African Americans, and Haitian immigrants. In response to these changes, the bicultural effectiveness training intervention was redesigned into the multicultural effectiveness training (Mancilla and Szapocznik, 1994) program that helps non-Cuban Hispanic parents understand the complex cultural context in which they live. In multicultural effectiveness training, the challenges faced by non-Cuban Hispanic families who find themselves in a culture that is heavily influenced by Cuban Americans are considered for the first time.

Dimensions of Family Functioning* Addressed in Brief Strategic Family Therapy
*Examples of problems in family interaction are listed under each of the five dimensions

2 This study was funded by National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) grant #1E0702694.

Brief Strategic Family Therapy	Juvenile Justice Bulletin • April 2000