Latina recruitment for cancer prevention education via Community Based Participatory Research strategies

Increasing minority participation in cancer research is an ethical and statistical necessity for gaining population-specific knowledge of cancer prevention, screening, and treatment. Locating and recruiting eligible and willing minority participants presents unique structural and cultural/linguistic challenges. Community Based Participatory Research provides a viable set of principles for facilitating recruitment in hard-to-recruit communities. We focus on the specific challenge of recruiting and engaging low-income and underinsured Latina women in cancer prevention education research, and present community-based strategies used to recruit women into a recently completed study in Arizona, Juntos en la Salud (Together in Health). Community representatives and promotoras' (Latino community health educators) involvement in site identification, individual recruitment, and development of strategies and materials for the interventions built engagement and trust. These strategies resulted in enrollment of an especially low-income, underinsured population. To emphasize the degree to which a particularly underserved population was recruited, we present data comparing demographic and screening profiles of enrollees to the general population of Latinos in Arizona.