Evaluating a Bilingual Voluntary Community-Based Healthcare Organization (original) (raw)

2013, Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse

The current study compared traditional recovery homes for individuals with substance use disorders to ones that had been modified to feature culturally-congruent communication styles. Findings indicated significant increases in employment income, with the size of the change significantly greater in the culturally-modified houses. Significant decreases in alcohol use over time were also found, with larger decreases over time in the traditional recovery homes. Use of prescribed medications as well as days using drugs significantly decreased over time, but not differentially for those in the two types of recovery homes. The implications of these findings are discussed. The size of the Latino population in the U.S. and projections for its growth require that substance abuse researchers pay increasing attention to the prevalence and treatment of alcohol abuse among this group (Alvarez, Jason, Olson, Ferrari, & Davis, 2007). National surveys indicate that this group has higher rates of substance-related problems (Caetano, 2003). Despite this risk, this segment of the U.S. population has less access to substance abuse treatment (Tighe & Saxe, 2006), reports less satisfaction with substance abuse interventions, and leaves treatment prematurely (Hser, Huang et al., 2004; White, Winn, & Requests for reprints should be sent to Leonard A