Response to Kreuter and Skinner

I am grateful for Kreuter and Skinner’s call for tion by that group’ and tailoring as ‘the adaptation of the intervention and/or total redesign to best fit consensus regarding use of the terms targeting and tailoring (Kreuter and Skinner, 2000), having the needs and characteristics of a target audience’. Taking this a step further, we defined cultural suffered the frustration of trying to identify a commonly agreed upon meaning for these words tailoring as ‘the development of interventions, strategies, messages and materials to conform with as they relate to health communications. Indeed, not having succeeded in that endeavor, my colspecific cultural characteristics’ (Pasick et al., 1996). While we did not anticipate it at the time leagues and I developed a set of definitions in 1996 (Pasick et al., 1996). Kreuter and Skinner these definitions were written, as part of the current NCI-funded Pathfinders project, we have similarly advance definitions, and I write now to suggest where further areas of consensus might developed and are testing individually tailored print pieces targeted to a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual be found. There are two relatively recent changes in our low-income population of women in Alameda County California. These ‘Personal Health Guides’ field that are entirely independent of one another but converge to render this discussion both import(PHGs) are culturally tailored to include themes, messages and graphics found to be consistent with ant and complex. One is the increasing diversity of the US population, and the desire in health values, beliefs and preferences shared by subgroups of African-American, Cantonese, Filipina, Latina education and behavioral science to understand and to be highly responsive to cultural factors. The and white women from the communities targeted by our intervention. other is advances in technology that only recently gave us the capability to develop individually Kreuter and Skinner have suggested the following definition for tailoring: ‘any combination of tailored printed material. These are highly compatible developments, and hopefully confusion over information or change strategies intended to reach one specific person, based on characteristics that terms will not distract us from the exciting work of developing, testing and delivering high quality, are unique to that person, related to the outcome of interest, and have been derived from an individual culturally appropriate tailored messages. By way of background, my colleagues and I assessment’ [italics in original] (Kreuter and Skinner, 2000). This is at once a refinement, in the have defined targeting as ‘the process of identifying a population subgroup (defined by parameters inclusion of specific elements and methods of tailoring, and a narrowing of the term in the relevant to health promotion goals and objectives) for the purpose of insuring exposure to the intervenrestriction that tailoring apply only to individuals, as opposed to groups, programs or other entities. Thus, as suggested by Kreuter and Skinner, adaptations made to interventions or messages designed Prevention Sciences, Northern California Cancer Center, PO Box 5033, Union City, CA 94587-3106, USA for specific groups are not to be regarded as