RESEARCH AND PLANNING
Before you begin to develop your materials, define the scope of your work. Answering the following questions will help you make key initial decisions:
- What topic will you address and what audience will you try to reach?
To determine which topics need to be addressed, review data describing the most prevalent types of traffic injuries and the groups most at risk. Define the parameters of the audience you intend to reach. For example:
- Geographic locale: Do you intend to target a diverse Spanish-speaking population across the county, or the population of your city or county? Does your target audience1 live in an urban area or a rural area?
- Heritage: Is your audience primarily composed of persons of similar heritage, or is it more heterogeneous? In the case of foreign-born persons, it is important to consider both country of origin and whether persons come from an urban or a rural background.
- Age, gender, etc.: Do you intend to target young children, 16–17-year-old males who are just beginning to drive, parents of young children, grandparents, mature adults in general, or some other specific group defined by age and/or gender?
If you are developing a national material, your target audience is likely to be defined by age and/or gender or by urban/rural locale, rather than by ethnic heritage. If you are developing a material that is local in scope, your target audience is likely to be from a particular country of origin. You may refine or expand your target audience as you move through the process of research and planning and as you identify partners and groups in particular need of educational materials. The Guidelines offer recommendations for appropriately targeting both diverse and specific audiences.
How WEST Chose a Community
We selected Holyoke for several reasons: EDC was already familiar with this community, having worked there on a previous project called “Kids in the Back”; the community wanted to address traffic safety issues affecting Latinos in their locality; and the project’s senior research assistant worked in the area and had contacts with professionals and residents who were interested in this project.
—EST staff |
- Can you use existing materials? Many Spanish-language materials on traffic safety topics already exist; you should examine these before deciding whether to create something new. You can view the list of existing materials identified by the EST project on the AAAFTS Web site (www.aaafoundation.org/projects/index.cfm?button=EDCintro).2
• If you decide to use an existing material, see the Adapting Existing Materials section of this document. It describes how to determine which aspects of an existing material you may need to update or modify and how to revise the material so that it will be effective with your target audience.
• If you decide to create a new material, follow the nine steps of the Guidelines. The first three steps show you how to work with partners to research and understand your audience, the topic, and the principles of effective health communication.
Why NHTSA decided to develop new materials rather than
adapt existing ones for a child passenger safety project
Recognizing Latino children are at great risk of injuries and deaths from traffic crashes, NHTSA provided funding to the National Latino Children’s Institute to develop a culturally and linguistically sensitive program to increase child passenger safety device use by young Latino parents and their extended families. Rather than translating or adapting English language materials, the NLCI developed the “Corazón de mi vida” (You are the heart of my life) program, which captures the essence of child passenger safety for Latinos.
–Robin Mayer, NHTSA |
 Identify Key Partners
To develop an accurate and effective traffic safety material, whether for a national or a local audience, you need to be familiar with three subjects:
- Traffic safety
- Effective health communication
- Your target audience
Few people are experts in all three areas. Find partners who can provide background and guidance in the areas outside of your expertise. You will draw on these experts throughout the process of developing your materials. You may also decide to co-produce the material with one or more of your partners, which can result in wider dissemination of the materials and reduce costs. The following are the types of partners you will need.
Traffic Safety Experts
Although you may have extensive knowledge about traffic safety, you will probably benefit from consulting others with more specialized expertise in the specific subject area that your material addresses, both to ensure the accuracy of the information presented in your material and to enhance the credibility of your material. This is especially important if you are developing a material that addresses a highly specialized topic, such as child passenger safety. Requesting their input, and possibly their collaboration, at the outset, will improve your material and build your ties to other organizations.
Health Communication Experts
You will need information about effective health communication techniques. These techniques include the way you convey your message, the graphics and format, and the way the materials are used (e.g., as part of a larger intervention or as a standalone effort). Certain communication approaches and formats are especially effective for audiences with low literacy. Information about these practices is available from organizations that specialize in health education and/or those who develop materials for audiences with low literacy or for those learning English as a second language. If your target audience is national in scope, you might want to collaborate with communications or public relations firms that routinely develop such materials for Spanish-speakers. Latino Culture Experts
You will need partners who are knowledgeable about Latino culture and health as well as partners who can provide access to your target audience. If your audience is broader in scope than a single community or a fairly homogeneous region, you will need to understand multiple subcultures, (e.g., Mexican, Colombian, Salvadoran) to ensure the final product will resonate equally well among all subcultures within the intended audience. You will find it most helpful to collaborate with both national and local Latino organizations and individuals.
- National Latino organizations understand effective ways to reach Latino audiences, know about existing educational resources for those audiences, and are familiar with examples of successful health-promotion strategies.
- Local Latino organizations include groups or agencies that serve the Latino community, such as health centers, local public health departments, youth-serving organizations, or service agencies. They also include local coalitions organized to address traffic safety and/or Latino health and safety issues, or individuals active in these areas. WEST, the community advisory group we convened in Holyoke, Massachusetts, is an example of a local Latino organization. The professionals and community leaders who staff these groups may be able to provide relevant information about the communities they serve, including information about social, economic, and environmental factors (e.g., attitudes toward law enforcement, distribution of incomes, availability of sidewalks) that may impact traffic safety needs and behaviors. In addition, you will be able to work with these local leaders to solicit input directly from community residents. You should draw on the knowledge of these local partners at least twice: at the beginning of the development process (in “Step 2: Understand Your Audience”) and after you have created a draft of your material (in “Step 7: Obtain Feedback from Your Audience and Partners”).
How to Identify Local Partners
If you do not have existing relationships with local groups, consider the following strategies to identify local partners:
- Ask your national Latino partner organization to draw on its community connections.
- Contact your state or local affiliates, chapters, or agencies and ask them to identify local organizations that work with the community members you are trying to reach.
- Work with your health communications partner or marketing firm, which will likely have experience in convening and soliciting feedback from community groups.
- Place notices on your electronic mailing lists, Web site, newsletters, and other venues to solicit interested local partners.
 For a list of potential partners, see appendix B, step 1.
How Two National Organizations Identified Local Partners
Education Development Center, Inc.: To develop a pedestrian safety material for Holyoke, Massachusetts, the EST senior research assistant, who lived in Holyoke, spoke with colleagues and others in the community who had expertise in traffic safety, public health, and Latino health issues and invited them to participate in a community advisory group. The group included representatives from the local SAFE KIDS coalition, a trauma center, and community service agencies. This is an example of bringing people together and developing your own group.
The National Latino Children’s Institute (NLCI): To develop “Corazón de mi vida,” we collaborated with several organizations. For traffic safety information, we worked with the Governor’s Highway Safety Office in Texas, consulted the state child passenger safety coordinator, and got help from our funding source, NHTSA. To make sure that “Corazón de mi vida” would be effective with a variety of groups across the country, we worked with our Promesa partners. These are community-based organizations that serve Latinos and are recognized as exemplary models of what works in the Latino community. Promesa programs have shown that health and social conditions can be improved when culturally appropriate strategies are used for outreach and services. In our grants to community-based organizations, we include small stipends for setting up focus groups, community meetings, and child passenger safety events. We also ask the staff in these organizations for feedback. They always tell us what they think! Here’s the most important point: When developing partnerships it is crucial that you allow your partners—small local organizations—to be part of the solution. You have to use a peer-to-peer model. You can’t just have the CEO of a company talking to the president of another organization. It’s the workers in an organization who can tell you what their clients want and need. |
1 The term target audience refers to the audience for which a material is intended.
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