"¿Cómo se Dice 'Behavior'?": Exploring Best Practices for Providing Culturally Responsive Supports for Spanish-Speaking Families is the kind of topic that looks straightforward until it collides with the speed, ambiguity, and competing demands of clinic sessions and day-to-day service delivery. In "¿Cómo se Dice 'Behavior'": Exploring Best Practices for Providing Culturally Responsive Supports for Spanish-Speaking Families, for this course, the practical stakes show up in better alignment between intervention and the family context in which it must survive, not in abstract discussion alone.
Provider: BehaviorLive — via Oregon Association for Behavior Analysis
Take This Course →Including ethics, supervision, and topics like this one. New live CEU every Wednesday.
Join Free →The field of ABA has recently seen a long overdue increase in the racial and ethnic diversity of its practitioners and of families eligible to receive ABA services (BACB, 2024; CDC, 2023). To support families with increasingly diverse needs, researchers and practitioners have taken positive steps in the development of culturally responsive and sustaining practices for English-speaking clinicians serving diverse populations (Baires et al., 2023; Castro-Hostetler et al., 2021). However, the body of ABA literature on culturally responsive practices for Latino clients with limited English proficiency (LEP) pays strikingly little attention to the need to support the cultural and professional competencies of Spanish-English bilingual clinicians. Although it is widely accepted that the accessibility and quality of ABA services is most effective when delivered in the primary language spoken by clients (Rispoli et al., 2011) and when parent training is culturally adapted (Buzhardt et al., 2016), there is a dearth of empirical and practical guidance for Spanish-English bilingual clinicians on best practices for providing services in Spanish. This poster offers a preliminary understanding and demonstrates the diverse range of experiences, perspectives, and knowledge held by bilingual ABA clinicians. Mixed quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyze survey responses regarding Spanish-speaking clinicians' confidence in disseminating clinical information in Spanish, the level of support and oversight received using Spanish in their practice, and the degree of concurrence of Spanish terms and phrases used in their practices. Our findings will inform culturally responsive and sustaining practices to better support bilingual clinicians serving LEP families.
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1.5 | General |
Miriam holds a Master's degree in Special Education from Portland State University and is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) with licensure in Oregon and Washington. Miriam's research interests include treatment equity in cross-cultural services, scope and practice of multi-lingual clinicians, and culturally responsive parent engagement. She is currently a Director of Clinical Services at Life Skills Autism Academy where she oversees the Gresham, Oregon region.
Side-by-side comparison with a clinical decision framework
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All behavior-analytic intervention is individualized. The information on this page is for educational purposes and does not constitute clinical advice. Treatment decisions should be informed by the best available published research, individualized assessment, and obtained with the informed consent of the client or their legal guardian. Behavior analysts are responsible for practicing within the boundaries of their competence and adhering to the BACB Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts.