Achieving Cultural Appropriateness in Health Promotion Programs: Targeted and Tailored Approaches

It is a truism of health education that programs and interventions will be more effective when they are culturally appropriate for the populations they serve. In practice, however, the strategies used to achieve cultural appropriateness vary widely. This article briefly describes five strategies commonly used to target programs to culturally defined groups. It then explains how a sixth approach, cultural tailoring, might extend these strategies and enhance our ability to develop effective programs for cultural groups. The authors illustrate this new approach with an example of cultural tailoring for cancer prevention in a population of lower income urban African American women.