Session: Health Equity/Social Determinants of Health 3
428 - Evaluation of the Short Course on Multilingual Approaches to Research Studies (MARS)
Saturday, April 26, 2025
2:30pm – 4:45pm HST
Publication Number: 428.4853
Priscilla M. Ortiz, CHOP, Philadelphia, PA, United States; Robert Schrauf, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, United States; Amy Olen, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, United States; Katherine Yun, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, United States
Applied Linguist / Language Services CHOP Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Background: The “Short Course on Multilingual Approaches to Research Studies” (MARS) offers 3 days of in-person research methods training to prepare health researchers to recruit and engage families with preferred language other than English (PLOE). MARS addresses a training gap that has led to exclusion of PLOE participants from up to 90% of published pediatric studies. MARS also seeks to promote career development for multilingual researchers. MARS is taught by clinical, public health, translation, and applied linguistics researchers, as well as language services professionals. The curriculum focuses on interpreter-mediated communication, translation protocols, and multilingual project management. Objective: To evaluate MARS, we examined participants’ self-assessed “multilingual research proficiency” (MRP). Design/Methods: MRP assessment covers four skill sets: multilingual communication (6 items), translation (7 items), research management (3 items), and grant-seeking (2 items). Participants rate themselves on three subscales for each of the 18 Likert-style items of the instrument (generating 36 self-ratings). These subscales (Table 1) are “can-do” self-assessments (e.g., I can explain, apply, and advise). Participants completed the MRP before and after each course (2022-2024). Because data sets are small and the data are not normally distributed, we used nonparametric statistics for the analyses and medians and quartiles in all graphs. We conducted Wilcoxon Signed Ranks for comparisons of pre- and posttests. Results: Of 98 MARS participants, 70 completed MRP pre- and posttests as shown in Table 2. Wilcoxon Signed Ranks test showed significant improvement at posttest over pretest for each cohort (p < .001, Figure 1). Similarly, participants showed significant improvement in two subscales in 2022 and for all four subscales in 2023 and 2024 (Bonferroni corrected alpha = 0.01): In 2022, Multilingual Communication (Z=-3.297) and Multilingual Translation (Z=-3.297). In 2023, Multilingual Communication (Z=-4.705), Multilingual Translation (Z=-4.705), Multilingual Project Management (Z=-4.705) and Grant-seeking (Z=-4.705). In 2024, Multilingual Communication (Z=-4.445), Multilingual Translation (Z=-4.495), Multilingual Project Management (Z=-3.966), and Multilingual Project Grant-seeking (Z=-3.618).
Conclusion(s): The “Short Course on MARS” improves participants’ self-assessed multilingual research proficiency. Comparable training on multilingual research methods should be mainstreamed into graduate and postgraduate child health research training.
