STUDY PROTOCOL article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Substance Use Disorders and Behavioral Addictions
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1663919
This article is part of the Research TopicSubstance Use Research and Population HealthView all 8 articles
Kipiyecipakiciipe ("Coming Home"): A Study Protocol for a Multi-Method Investigation of Culturally Grounded Resilience against Substance-Use among Shawnee Adults
Provisionally accepted- 1Laureate Institute for Brain Research, Tulsa, United States
- 2The University of Tulsa Oxley College of Health & Natural Sciences, Tulsa, United States
- 3Oklahoma State University Department of Psychology, Stillwater, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Background: American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) peoples bear the highest U.S. burden of substance-use disorder (SUD) and drug-overdose mortality. Mechanistic evidence linking community-defined cultural protective factors to neurobehavioral pathways of SUD risk is virtually absent. Most AI/AN health studies are descriptive and rarely integrate neuroscience. Objectives: The Kipiyecipakiciipe ("coming home") project aims to (i) operationalize Shawnee-defined cultural engagement variables, (ii) test their associations with neurobehavioral markers of reward, decision-making, and self-regulation, and (iii) establish evidence base for tribally guided prevention and recovery strategies. Methods: Guided by community-based participatory research, the three-phase multi-method protocol combines qualitative inquiry, a Community Readiness Assessment (CRA), and multimodal neuroimaging. Phase 1 included 22 Shawnee adults and employed N = 3 focus-group discussions (including Nominal Group Technique) and N = 1 in-depth interview to generate an operational lexicon of cultural protective factors and to adapt a Community Needs Assessment (CNA). Phase 2 enrolls 90 Shawnee adults in a simultaneous functional MRI/electro-encephalography (fMRI/EEG) battery comprising culturally tailored picture and audio paradigms, a Monetary Incentive Delay task, a three-arm bandit task, and the Horizon exploration task. Self-report scales assess cultural identity, mental health, substance use, impulsivity, and risk. Parallel CRA interviews (n = 12) quantify community readiness for SUD interventions across six dimensions. Phase 3 will recruit Shawnee citizens with lived SUD experience to examine whether cultural, behavioral, and neural markers predict recovery-related outcomes (e.g., craving, self-efficacy). Discussion: By integrating community insight with state-of-the-art neuroimaging under Tribal governance, this protocol addresses critical knowledge gaps in Indigenous SUD research, models CARE-aligned data stewardship and establishes a transferable framework for culturally grounded precision substance use prevention.
Keywords: substance use disorder, Indigenous health, Neuroimaging, Community readiness, qualitative methods, mixed-methods, tribal sovereignty, population health
Received: 11 Jul 2025; Accepted: 30 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 White, Tomm, Bethel, Cochran, Torres, Baughman, Wigelsworth, Ren and Vaught. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Evan White, ewhite@laureateinstitute.org
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.