ALUM JENNIFER BELL SMITH, PHD, GIVES A VOICE TO ARABIC COMMUNITIES THROUGH

Culturally Appropriate Socialemotional Assessments

One alum is making a difference in her community and across the world.

Jennifer Bell Smith, PhD, CCC-SLP (PhD and MA in Infant and Early Childhood Development with a focus in Mental Health and Developmental Disorders, ‘22, ‘19) is a Pediatric Speech-Language Pathologist who has been working with neurodiverse children, including those on the autism spectrum, for more than 30 years. In her educational path and career roles, she has used various tools to give children a voice and parents more understanding of their children.

When beginning to craft her dissertation, Dr. Smith ultimately decided to weave her speech pathology expertise with a focus on Arabic-speaking populations. She collaborated with former Fielding faculty member Joshua Feder, MD, who had working relationships with people in Palestine.

Often, Arabic-speaking children and parents encounter communication, cultural, and other barriers with Westernbased assessments. Dr. Smith studied one such assessment, the Greenspan Social-Emotional Growth Chart (GSEGC), a screening tool for children from birth to five for socialemotional development problems, such as autism.

“Very few assessments have been made for Arabic people by Arabic people,” Dr. Smith said. “If an assessment was not developed and normed for a particular group, you can't just do a word-for-word translation and assume it's going to be relevant and applicable to that group. For example, you can’t say, ‘Oh, here’s a test developed in Chicago on American kids. It says that kids do this particular skill when they're 20 months old. It must be the same for all kids around the world.’ Given linguistic differences and divergent cultural practices and expectations, you can't assume that in other parts of the world, kids hit milestones in the same way at the same age.”

During a three-year process, she worked with a multidisciplinary group of clinicians at the Palestinian Child Institute, housed at An-Najah University in the West Bank. They worked to translate the GSEGC into an understandable, accurate, and culturally acceptable Arabic version, the GSEGC-A.

“At first, I wondered why these people so far away would want to go to all this trouble,” Dr. Smith said. “And what the Institute’s Dr. Ali Shaar told me was, ‘It just means so much. People around the world look at Palestinians as victims, and we want them to know that we can help other people, not only in our own backyard, but we can help children around the world.’ It just hit me so hard when he said that. I realized this work is really important for a lot of different reasons.”

Dr. Smith and the team discovered that the study’s representative sample of parents and clinicians found the GSEGC-A version was understandable, accurate, and culturally acceptable. This included definitions of words, non-verbal communication, and other potential differences between the two cultures. They also found that the GSEGC-A differentially diagnosed children with socialemotional difficulties and is a promising tool for further study with a wider sample.

“What it all boils down to is, people love their children, and they want to do what's best for them,” Dr. Smith said. “Our humanity is the same.”

This partnership demonstrated that collaboration across cultures, religions, languages, professions, and time zones is not only feasible but productive. It sowed the seeds for potential models of cross-cultural collaboration in the future, showcasing the importance for assessment tools to take language and culture into consideration. Members of all the relevant cultures should be integral parts of the process.

In her current work, she plans to continue to use the GSEGC in her clinical practice, learn more about other cultures, and continue to grow as a scholar-practitioner.

In January, Dr. Smith will begin her newest Fielding journey as an Associate Faculty member in the Infant and Early Childhood Development Program in the School of Psychology.