Knocking on Doors Posted on January 20, 2009 Antonio Cepeda-Benito (bio) explains how he formed working relationships with Abilio Reig Ferrer and Jaime Vila.

I started to use my strengths, and one of them was adapting measures to be used with both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking populations. And I established my first collaboration with a professor at the University of Alicante. His name is Abilio Reig Ferrer.

And the way I did that was that one of the summers that I went to vacation to Spain with my family, while my wife and my kids were at the beach and swimming and enjoying the sun and making sand castles, I would take the bus and would go to the university to the campus and started knocking on doors. And say, "I'd like to collect this data and validate this instrument. Is there somebody who would like to help me do that?"

And so Abilio was there, and he listened to what I wanted to do. He thought it was interesting. And he facilitated a little bit the obtaining permission to do the research there. I already had an IRB from my own university. And we, I just started collecting data that very summer with students from University of Alicante, asking them to complete the questionnaires. And that turned out to be a paper, and from that one, after that one came several after that, other projects that we had in common.

Sometimes things happen by chance, who you know. I got one call one day from somebody from Granada, Jaime Vila, and said, "I'd like you to come in a couple of weeks to give a seminar, because we have this master's program on substance abuse, and we would like you to give eight hours of coursework."

I said, "Sure." So I went there. And so I did again some of the same sort of thing and brought with me some questionnaires to validate a different instrument. And they helped me pass those instruments out, and I gave my seminars and my things. And that has become a very successful collaboration as well.