Recruitment, enrollment and retention of young black men for HIV prevention research: Experiences from The 411 for Safe Text project

ObjectiveThere is abundant evidence of the HIV crisis in the black community, yet African Americans—and African American men in particular—are consistently under-represented in research on HIV prevention. The purpose of this paper is to describe the methods used to recruit and retain young black men in Philadelphia for an HIV prevention intervention.MethodsWe formed a partnership between community members, Media Education Entertainment (MEE) Productions, Inc., and academic researchers of the Colorado School of Public Health (CSPH). Recognizing the core principles of community-based participatory research (CBPR), face-to-face recruitment was first conducted by MEE with the assistance of their community partners; subsequent enrollment and data collection were conducted over the telephone by staff in Colorado.ResultsWe enrolled 58% of the young black men recruited, retained 77% of the young men for a follow-up survey at three months, and 65% of the initial enrollees were retained for the six-month follow-up survey. Enrollment staff in Colorado reported initial challenges because of time elapse between recruitment and enrollment as well as participants' unfamiliarity with the enrollment staff. Subsequently, MEE recruitment staff emphasized the telephone area code and specific names of Colorado enrollment staff who would call.ConclusionOur results demonstrate the importance of the community–academic partnership formed and adherence to the principles of CBPR in carrying out this work. Despite challenges in recruitment of racially and ethnically diverse participants for research, we successfully recruited, enrolled, and retained young black men in an HIV prevention program.