Recruitment of African American Women to a Walking Program: Eligibility, Ineligibility, and Attrition During Screening

Abstract

The purposes of this study were to identify strategies successful in the recruitment of African American (AA) women to a home-based walking program and to examine factors that contribute to attrition, eligibility, and ineligibility during the recruitment screening protocol. Of the 696 women who contacted the researchers, 281 (40.4%) women enrolled in the study, 227 (32.6%) were lost to attrition, and 188 (27%) were ineligible. Those not enrolled due to attrition during screening or ineligibility reported more family risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and lived in neighborhoods with higher poverty. Although our recruitment strategies may have been successful in attracting low-income AA women, we were not as successful in preventing their attrition during the screening protocol, particularly for those living in poorer neighborhoods.

What are successful recruitment and retention strategies for underserved populations? Examining physical activity interventions in primary care and community settings

“…Intervention characteristics-Interventions most commonly were group-based classes; also included were promotion of walking [28][29][30][31][32][33][34], individual, homebased lifestyle physical activity (physical activity type not specified) [35,36], and mixed/multiple types of activity [33,[37][38][39]. The majority of interventions were either neighborhood-or community-based (n=11) or at community/cultural or recreation centers (n=9).…”

“…The majority of interventions were either neighborhood-or community-based (n=11) or at community/cultural or recreation centers (n=9). Other intervention venues consisted of churches [33,[40][41][42][43], primary care clinics [29,38,44,45], home-based [30,36], health clubs [46][47][48], and schools [35,[49][50][51][52][53]. Persons delivering the intervention varied; the interventionists' training and background experience were inconsistently described.…”

“…The story's theme was woven into the description of study goals and procedures and allowed the researchers to complete their recruitment efficiently. For those studies that reported on it, social networking/word-of-mouth was a very effective means of recruitment [30,46,47,54,64].…”

“…As with recruitment, all studies had multiple retention strategies; retention strategies were usually described in much less depth, however. The studies with the highest retention rates emphasized the importance of formative research and ongoing process evaluation that they conducted to specifically maintain or enhance retention via a carefully designed, well-developed, appealing intervention [7,30,37,38,43,45,49,50,53,55,56,58,65].…”

Associations between Culturally Relevant Recruitment Strategies and Participant Interest, Enrollment and Generalizability in a Weight-loss Intervention for African American Families

“…However, recruitment of minorities into health promotion interventions remains challenging due to significant barriers including competing demands on time, 2 inconvenient locations, lack of transportation, 3 and caution of participation in novel intervention strategies given historical treatment of African Americans in research. [4][5][6] Lower recruitment and enrollment rates in health promotion trials among African Americans may, in part, result from the lack of integrating sociocultural values into recruitment strategies.…”