DESCRIPTION: (Applicant's Description) The Women's Health Initiative, a ten year nationwide study of critical factors in women's health, is committed to recruiting representative proportions of minorities. The major recruitment strategy, mass mailing, has been successful for Anglos in the Arizona WHI study, but not for Hispanic women. Rather, personal advocacy -- participants recruiting friends and acquaintances -- appears to be the more successful strategy within the local Hispanic communities. This strategy has emerged in practice, but has not been systematically studied nor tapped. The overall objective of this research project is to increase our understanding of the processes by which personal advocacy works in recruitment and retention in research studies, particularly within the Hispanic cultural framework, and to develop a training program to enhance these processes among new recruits. This will be accomplished by (a) identifying aspects of communication that make current advocates successful (i.e., network linkages, personal characteristics, culturally consonant communication strategies, and the level of knowledge about the WHI research), (b) assessing the reasons for attrition, and (c) applying this knowledge to train other women to enhance their effectiveness in recruitment and retention and evaluate contributors to this success using the Advocacy Indicators Inventory. The study will be grounded in the Hispanic values of personalismo and confianza. The results will help others develop effective advocacy and retention programs in future studies of Hispanic populations.
NIH ExPorter
NIH ExPorter