Testing the efficacy of culturally adapted coping skills training for Chinese American immigrants with type 2 diabetes using community-based participatory research.

Chinese Americans demonstrate greater prevalence of diabetes than non-Hispanic whites and find standard diabetes care disregards their cultural health beliefs. Academic researchers and Chinatown agencies collaborated to culturally adapt and test an efficacious cognitive-behavioral intervention using community-based participatory research. Using a delayed-treatment repeated-measures design, 145 adult Chinese immigrants with Type 2 diabetes completed treatment. Immediate benefits of treatment were evident in the improvement (p < .05) in diabetes self-efficacy, diabetes knowledge, bicultural efficacy, family emotional and instrumental support, diabetes quality of life, and diabetes distress. Prolonged benefits were evident in all changed variables 2 months post-intervention. The CBPR approach enabled the development of a culturally acceptable, efficacious behavioral intervention, and provides a model for working with communities that demonstrate health disparities.