Impact of a Culturally Adapted Version of Illness Management and Recovery on Israeli Arabs With Serious Mental Illness

Abstract

In recent years, there has been growing awareness of the need for cultural adaptation of evidence-based practices, which is essential for successful implementation in diverse cultural contexts. This study investigated the impact of a culturally adapted version of Illness Management and Recovery (IMR), an evidence-based practice developed in the United States, on Israeli Arabs with serious mental illness.Methods: Using a quasi-experimental design, we compared the outcomes of 86 people who completed the culturally adapted IMR version with outcomes from a matched control group (N=64) who received treatment as usual.Results: Mixed repeated-measures analyses of variance demonstrated significant improvements in the domains of recovery, hope, self-efficacy, and quality of life among those who completed culturally adapted IMR. Conclusions:The culturally adapted Arabic version of IMR for Israeli Arabs was found to generate significant positive improvement. The findings are discussed with emphasis on the importance of cultural adaptation.

Facilitators and barriers in the implementation of a culturally adapted Arabic version of Illness Management and Recovery (IMR) among Palestinian Arabs in Israel

“…Our findings lend support to the notion that to implement culturally adapted interventions, care must be taken to preserve their core principles, which are often Western, as well as to introduce culture-specific elements (Daass-Iraqi et al, 2020). There is reason for optimism as, overall, the findings suggest that cultural difference may be overcome in implementing EBPs developed in the West, given that multiple culture-specific facilitators have been identified, whereas only one barrier was culture-specific.…”

“…These were subsequently integrated into the IMR manual, translated into Arabic, and used to train Arab practitioners. The culturally adapted Arabic version of IMR was found to generate significant clinical improvement in recovery, illness management, hope, and quality of life, with more than half the clinical groups showing improvement (Daass-Iraqi et al, 2020). Given that improvement and in order to promote further improvements in this and other interventions, our research questions were:…”

Assessing the Psychometric Properties of the Illness Management and Recovery Scale: A Systematic Review Using the Consensus-Based Standards for the Selection of Health Measurement Instruments (COSMIN)

“…First, we identified no studies reporting information on criterion validity. Second, although different cultural adaptations have been identified, these studies do not provide detailed information about the adaptation procedure carried out or the psychometric properties of the adapted versions, nor do they provide evidence about cross-cultural metric equivalence [6,12,18,20,33,35,37,44].…”