Ann Marie Yamada, assistant professor at the USC School of Social Work, has received a $733,500 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to pilot test a new intervention to give mental health providers in psychosocial rehabilitation services a more effective way to assess sociocultural issues across diverse client populations.

The development and testing of the intervention will be conducted in close collaboration with a large mental health rehabilitation agency in Los Angeles that serves primarily an urban, inner city ethnically diverse population of clients with severe mental illness. The study aims to generate practical information that can be used to enhance the delivery of effective psychosocial interventions across diverse cultural groups and to support the development of culturally tailored interventions that could reduce disparities in mental health service use among vulnerable and underserved clients.

"Sociocultural issues, such as social support, family involvement in decision-making and stability of one's environment, influence satisfaction with mental health services and the overall quality of life of clients, especially for ethnic minority clients." Yamada said. "The intervention we will develop provides a method to embed the assessment of sociocultural issues into routine psychosocial rehabilitation practice."

A thorough assessment of sociocultural issues becomes a foundation on which practitioners can examine the relevance of their interventions for the diverse groups they encounter in everyday practice—a necessary step when designing culturally relevant, empirically supported practices, she explained.

Over three years, Yamada and her team, which includes the school's Associate Dean of Research John Brekke as co-principal investigator, will adapt a sociocultural assessment tool and design the intervention, which will be offered to a group of providers within the collaborating community-based mental health agency. The assessment skills and cultural sensitivity of these providers will be compared to that of providers who do not receive the intervention. Administrator and provider satisfaction with the sociocultural assessment tool and the feasibility of embedding the tool into the providers' routine provision of mental health services will also be evaluated.