• promote the balance of spirituality, faith, medicine, and science; and
• adapt the language in written and oral communications to the patient.

PUBLIC AND PROVIDER EDUCATION

Approaching Community Physicians

Worta McKaskill-Stevens points out that community physician involvement in cooperative trials is needed. The National Medical Association (22,000 minority physicians, two-thirds of whom are primary care providers) is working closely with the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group to develop a protocol-specific patient brochure. The text includes sections on IRBs and who the participants are, and a layperson is on the IRB. It provides general information for clinical trials.

Recruiting Asian Americans for Smoking Cessation Research

Moon Chen, Jr., points out that researchers are challenged to recruit Asian Americans if they overlook the tremendous diversity within Asian-American populations. The majority of Asian Americans are foreign born (especially true with regard to the Southeast Asian populations in the United States), thereby posing linguistic barriers to recruitment. There is a relative dearth of research information on these populations, which is especially alarming given the high rate of health risk behaviors such as smoking (for example, 57 percent of Southeast Asian males in the San Francisco Bay area smoke). A research project in Ohio solicited community support and hired workers from Asian ethnic groups to find study samples via the telephone book and home visits, in part to establish rapport for a long-term relationship instead of simply collecting data. Similarly, educational outreach efforts in California proved successful when antismoking messages were tailored to particular groups and were presented by use of outdoor billboards and educational classes in settings where community members gather.

Successful Recruitment of African-American Men: The DEED Program

Isaac Powell describes the Detroit Education and Early Detection (DEED) program, which studied prostate-specific antigen changes among African-American men enrolled in a prostate cancer screening program. Researchers assessed these men's attitudes toward the health care system and found that fear of a positive diagnosis was a significant barrier to participation (many men held fatalistic attitudes toward a diagnosis