American Journal of Community Psychology, VoL 19, No. 4, 1991 Reinventing Fidelity: The Transfer of Social Technology Among Settings 1 Laurie J. Bauman, 2 Ruth E. K. Stein, and Henry T. Ireys Preventive Intervention Research Center for Child Health and the Department of Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of MedichTe In an ideal world, effective programs Woltld be disseminated on a large scale, but many obstacles block program diffi,sion. To date, little guidance has been provided by program designers' on how to implement the program in different sites with different personnel and client populations. This article discusses the debate between the "fidelity camp" and the "reinvention camp" and suggests an approach that reconciles the two positions: fidelity should be maintained to the program's mechanism of operation; reinvention is permitted in imple- mentation if the causal mechanism is presen,ed. Such an approach is essential for effective dissemination of preventive hztelventions that are successful in con- trolled trials. The broad goals for the field of prevention include (a) building a generative knowledge base (basic research); (b) developing new programs (the appli- cation of change technology); and (c) disseminating effective programs for others to use (diffusion of innovation). Of these three goals, the last has received less attention than the first two. Although effective programs ide- ally should be adopted on a large scale, our understanding of how to im- plement programs in new sites with different personnel and client populations is limited. This problem is not unique to prevention. In other social problem areas, programs shown to be effective in single trials were not adopted on 1We thank Richard H. P. Mendes for his helpful comments and suggestions. This work was funded by National Institute of Mental Health grant 5P50-MH38280. 2All correspondence should be sent to Laurie J. Bauman, Department of Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, 1300 Morris Park Avenue, Bronx, New York 10461. 619 0091-0562/91/0800-0619506.50/0 c(c) 1991 Plenum Publishing Corporation