The recruitment of breast cancer survivors into cancer control studies: a focus on African-American women.

The recruitment of African Americans into cancer prevention and control studies has presented a major challenge to scientific investigators. Scientific findings, whether biomedical or behavioral, may not be appropriate and applicable to ethnic minority populations unless they are adequately represented as study participants. Moreover, the need to involve greater numbers of ethnic minorities is quite urgent due to the poor morbidity and mortality outcomes associated with ethnic minority group membership. Such is the case with breast cancer survivorship. The purpose of the study was to test a personalized recruitment strategy on response rate in African-American women. The response rate of 45% (n = 117) African Americans and 64% (n = 161) white subjects indicated only limited success in the recruitment of the African-American breast cancer survivors. The recruitment result suggests that culturally relevant recruitment strategies (e.g., inclusion of African-American investigators, culturally consistent letter of recruitment) may be insufficient in adequately increasing research participation. Therefore, further studies on investigating factors that influence research participation (eg, type of incentives, and schedule of payment as well as type of stationery and stamps used) are needed.