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© 2017 Society of Urologic Nurses and Associates
Owens, O.L., James, C., & Friedman, D.B. (2017). Overcoming the challenges of African-American recruitment in health sciences research: Strategies and recommendations. Urologic Nursing, 37(5), 293-303, 315. doi:10.7257/1053-816X. 2017.37.5.293
Culturally appropriate recruiting strategies will increase the number of African-American men consenting to participate in prostate cancer research. This article describes the complexity of recruitment issues and highlights strategies that enhance research participation.
Key Words: African American, recruitment, prostate cancer, health disparities, minority health.
Despite decreasing incidence and mortality rates for prostate cancer (PrCA) over the past decade, it remains the most common cancer among men (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [DHHS], Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], & the National Cancer Institute [NCI], 2016). In addition, there is a widening disparity in both the incidence and mortality rates of African-American and European-American men, with African-American men having almost twice the incidence and three times the mortality as European-American men (Siegel, Miller, & Jemal, 2016). More specifically, African-American men have a PrCA incidence rate of 203.5 per 100,000, while the rate for European-American men is 121.9 per 100,000. Data from the NCI (2016) indicate that mortality rates are even more disparate; mortality for African-American men is 44.2/100,000, while European-American men have a 19.1/100,000 mortality rate. To reduce this disparity, a number of cancer prevention and control studies have been implemented (Wallner & Jacobsen, 2013).
Alarmingly, African Americans comprise only 3% of overall cancer clinical trials and have been absent from participation in other clinical trials and medical research (Chen, Lara, Dang, Paterniti, & Kelly, 2014). This lack of participation limits the ability to generalize study results, allowing health disparities to persist (Wallington et al., 2016). For example, Oren, Oren, and Beach (2016), reported that most clinical studies in PrCA (including five of the largest studies ever conducted to study the efficacy of prostate-specific antigen screening) had few to no African-American participants. However, PrCA screening recommendations made by the U.S. Pre ventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) (2016), based partly on these data, have been generalized to this high-risk population (Moyer, 2012).
Problem Statement
In most recent studies that detail the recruitment process, researchers focused on the use of one to two modalities used to identify and...