© 2003 American Public Health Association
Alice Ammerman is with the Department of Nutrition, Schools of Public Health and Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Giselle Corbie-Smith is with the Departments of Social Medicine and Medicine and the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Diane Marie M. St. George is with the School of Health and Human Services, Walden University, Minneapolis, Minn. Chanetta Washington is with the Carolina-Shaw Partnership on Elimination of Health Disparities, Shaw University, Raleigh, NC. Benita Weathers is with the Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At the time of the study, Bethany Jackson-Christian was with the Nutrition Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Alice Ammerman, DrPH, RD, Department of Nutrition, Schools of Public Health and Medicine, CB #7416, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599 (e-mail: alice_ammerman{at}unc.edu).
Objectives. This study sought to examine the expectations and satisfaction of pastors and lay leaders regarding a research partnership in a randomized trial guided by community-based participatory research (CBPR) methods. Methods. Telephone and self-administered print surveys were administered to 78 pastors and lay leaders. In-depth interviews were conducted with 4 pastors after study completion. Results. The combined survey response rate was 65%. Research expectations included honest and frequent communication, sensitivity to the church environment, interaction as partners, and results provided to the churches. Satisfaction with the research partnership was high, but so was concern about the need for all research teams to establish trust with church partners. Conclusions. Pastors and lay leaders have high expectations regarding university obligations in research partnerships. An intervention study based on CBPR methods was able to meet most of these expectations.
Including African Americans in research has become an important challenge faced by investigators hoping to address disparities in health. Investigators engaged in research involving underserved populations are acutely aware of the role of historical events and current experiences with medical care in contributing to distrust of medical research.14 A recent report suggests that African Americans are significantly more likely than their White counterparts to believe that medical research exposes them to unnecessary risks and that they do not receive a full explanation of the implications of research participation.5 Investigators sensitive to these issues often look to the African American church as a way to reach members of this community,612 and they see community-based participatory research (CBPR) as an approach that can help address some of these barriers.1323 Use of participatory approaches can help overcome distrust by fostering open and honest communication about the research process and engagement of participants in study planning and implementation. The CBPR approach views community participants as partners in the research process rather than as subjects on whom research is conducted.13,15 As investigators approach churches to become research partners, engagement of pastors and other church leaders is critical to program acceptance and success. Pastors in the African American church can play a pivotal role in the adoption of health promotion and research activities.6,8,24 The pastors introduction and endorsement of a program to his or her congregation is essential to any such effort. Because pastors face considerable demands on their time and extensive responsibilities both inside and outside the church, they often rely on the assistance of lay church leaders. Although the role of pastors and other church leaders is fundamental to health disparities research efforts, little is known about their expectations regarding communityacademic partnerships or the degree to which they believe these expectations are met at the conclusion of a research endeavor. Without an understanding of these expectations, researchers are likely to fail in their attempts to engage church leaders and their members in research collaborations. Initiating a research partnership without a full understanding of expectations may result in decisions and actions that further violate the trust of the African American church community. Not only can distrust adversely affect the immediate research relationship and, in turn, the validity of the data collected, it can have a profound effect on the future willingness of minority populations to engage in the research enterprise. In this article, we present data regarding the expectations of pastors and other church leaders participating in a research partnership, Partnership to Reach African Americans to Increase Smart Eating (PRAISE!), as well as the degree to which they felt that their expectations were met. This study partnership implemented many principles of CBPR.
Overview of PRAISE! PRAISE!, funded by the National Cancer Institute, was a 5-year randomized study (19962001) that included 60 churches in 8 North Carolina counties.12 The project was designed to identify barriers to and motivators of dietary change among African Americans; to develop a theory-based, culturally sensitive intervention; and to test this 12-month intervention in a randomized trial. The major dietary outcomes were intake of fat, fruits, vegetables, and fiber. Also collected were biochemical measures related to dietary intake and psychosocial data to assess determinants of behavioral change. PRAISE! was designed as a multilevel intervention with particular attention to cultural appropriateness, long-term sustainability within the church environment, and potential for dissemination to other interested churches. A description of the design and implementation of the intervention has been published elsewhere.12 We implemented many elements of CBPR in the PRAISE! research partnership, with church and community members engaged early in the process and throughout the project. In the purest form of CBPR, community members determine the focus of the research question; however, because this project was funded in response to a program announcement from the National Cancer Institute, we were confined to an emphasis on cancer prevention. Nonetheless, throughout the project the study team relied on input from members of the church community to guide the nature and structure of the intervention. Church leaders and community members hired as staff were involved with decisions about survey design and implementation and about approaches to collecting anthropometric and biochemical data.
Study Design
Recruitment of PRAISE! Churches, Pastors, Church Leaders, and Church Members
Intervention Implementation
Survey Development Survey administration. After the 12-month intervention period, pastors (intervention and delayed intervention), church liaisons, and HAT leaders were asked to respond to follow-up surveys. Pastor surveys were conducted by phone interview, and church liaisons and HAT leaders completed self-administered print surveys. The pastor surveys were conducted by individuals not directly associated with the PRAISE! implementation team to encourage honest responses about any concerns with the project. Although the surveys for each respondent group varied in their content, a number of questions regarding participation in a research partnership with a university were identical, or nearly identical, in all 4 surveys. This report analyzes the survey data related to basic sociodemographic characteristics of the church leaders, their reasons for participating in PRAISE!, their assessments of their congregations willingness and readiness to participate in research, their expectations of a churchuniversity partnership, their beliefs about the degree to which these expectations were met, and their appraisals of the value of the PRAISE! research endeavor to themselves and their congregations. Frequency distributions were generated to describe the attributes of the church leader groups. Because of the similarity in response distributions of the church liaisons and HAT leaders, those 2 groups of respondents were categorized as "Lay Leaders." In-depth interviews with pastors. As part of another project concerning the potential for existing research projects to help link investigators with community-based study partners, we conducted in-depth interviews with 4 PRAISE! pastors in 2 different groupings after completion of the PRAISE! project. They were asked to discuss their concerns about research, suggest how researchers could improve their approach, and consider how they would feel about new researchers asking to contact them on the basis of a prior established research partnership.
Survey Data Survey respondents. Respondents included 24 of 30 church liaisons (response rate = 80%), 20 of 30 Health Action Team leaders (response rate = 67%), 23 of 30 intervention group pastors (response rate = 77%), and 11 of 30 delayed-intervention group pastors (response rate = 37%). Lay leaders (church liaisons and HAT leaders) were predominantly employed females aged 35 to 65 years, the majority (79%) of whom had attended college (Table 1
Reasons for participation. All church leaders were asked to select their top reasons for agreeing to participate in PRAISE! Interest in cancer prevention (n = 15), nutrition education (n = 15), and concern for their congregations health were most commonly cited among the pastors top reasons for PRAISE! participation (Table 2
Expectations Regarding Research Partnerships Church leaders were provided with a list of 12 possible characteristics of a churchuniversity research partnership and asked to rate each characteristics importance. Leaders endorsed the level of importance of each characteristic as not important, very important, or extremely important (Table 3
Perceived Compliance of the University With Research Expectations After rating the importance of these partnership components, pastors in both groups were asked, "Which three of these do you consider to be the most important parts of the university/church partnership?" followed by "To what extent do you feel [University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill] has met your expectations in this regard?" Response options included disappointing, needs improvement, doing pretty well, and doing very well. For each of the 3 components selected as most important, 77% to 80% of pastors indicated that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) was doing pretty or very well, and 2 pastors indicated 1 area each in which they were disappointed. The lay leaders were asked a more global question, "To what extent do you feel UNC fulfilled your expectations in its partnership with your church?" Ninety-eight percent of the lay leaders indicated that the university was doing pretty or very well, and 1 person indicated the need for improvement.
Open-ended responses.
At several points in the survey, pastors were offered the opportunity to describe additional concerns or recommendations in an open-ended format. All of the responses to 2 such questions(1) "Would you recommend any changes concerning the way project staff at [the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill] made contact with you about the PRAISE! project?" and (2) "Is there anything I have not mentioned that you think would be important to consider when churches and universities form a partnership?"are included in Table 4
Perceived value of research participation. As a method of measuring their beliefs about the value of participating in this research effort, leaders were asked to assess whether PRAISE! participation had been worth their time and their congregations time. Both pastors and lay leaders agreed that the research project was worth their own time and that of their congregations (Table 4
In-Depth Interviews
We found the church leaders had multiple expectations from their university research partners. Leaders endorsed comments about the importance of communication, cultural sensitivity, support during the project, and giving back to the community in a research partnership. In this trial, which used a CBPR approach, church leaders reported that most of their expectations were successfully met. Important limitations of this study include the small sample size and the lack of variability in the responses. Had we a larger sample size or more variability, we might have been able to compare intervention with control-group pastors or pastors with lay church leaders or to assess some of the determinants of research expectations and the degree to which the church leaders felt that their expectations were met. These limitations are potentially offset by the utility of quantitative descriptive data on the expectations of church leaders as they enter a research partnership. We believe that our findings will be valuable to those planning or conducting research in African American churches, as well as to those considering CBPR as an approach to health disparities research.
In addition, the possibility of social desirability or bias resulting from nonresponse must be raised, given the overwhelmingly positive responses to participation in PRAISE! in contrast to the high levels of skepticism about research documented by our research team and others.2,5 Possible explanations are that our research partners wanted to spare us from any criticism they might have or that all of the critics failed to respond to the survey. We think that both of these explanations are unlikely. The open-ended comments (Table 4 In terms of possible bias resulting from nonresponse, none of the 60 churches originally enrolled in the study dropped out, and all 30 of the intervention churches completed all of the 9 interventions that were required as part of the memorandum of agreement. In an attempt to adequately document intervention implementation, church leaders involved with the study were asked to provide extensive documentation.25 This heavy administrative burden, combined with the very demanding schedules of pastors and the multiple volunteer church responsibilities of the lay leaders, made it difficult to reach them for survey completion. Because much of the follow-up survey content related to experience with the intervention, we did not push as hard to obtain responses from delayed-intervention control-group pastors, whose churches had not yet received the intervention training or materials. Thus, we tried to strike a balance between research demands and human needsenergetically striving to collect adequate data while refraining from excessively burdening our church colleagues. We believe that our somewhat limited response rate is more likely attributable to response burden than to dissatisfaction with the partnership. In considering the role CBPR methods may have played in fostering this positive research partnership, it is helpful to use the framework of the 8 key principles of CBPR, as outlined by Israel and colleagues.13
In sum, we found that church leaders have high expectations of their university research partners regarding many aspects of the research process and that a randomized trial using CBPR methods can be successful in meeting many of these expectations. We hope that more studies that use CBPR to form partnerships between research institutions and minority communities will help build the trust so critical to fostering high-quality health disparities research.
This work was supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute (RO1 CA73981 and RO1 CA73981-S06S1), the National Institutes of Health (K01 HL04039), the Robert Wood Johnson Minority Medical Faculty Development Program, and NIH-NCMHD (1-P60-MD00024401). We also thank the church pastors, lay leaders, and members who joined us in this research partnership.
Human Participant Protection
Contributors A. Ammerman, C. Washington, and B. Weathers were involved with the PRAISE! Project throughout. They conceived the study, intervention design, and assessment of the intervention. G. Corbie-Smith provided expertise in trust and research expectations and with D. M. M. St. George provided assistance with statistical analysis and interpretation. Accepted for publication May 22, 2003.
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