The successful recruitment and retention of willing, eligible, racially diverse study subjects is an expensive, labor-intensive activity that is often duplicated by research teams unless a centralized resource is available. Moreover, it benefits from an infrastructure, which includes racially and linguistically diverse staff, culturally competent research teams, an informed public, and supportive, involved community based contacts. Over the past ten years, we have successfully developed this infrastructure and named it the Harvard Cooperative Program on Aging (HCPOA). It has gained community respect as an academic institution that is committed to the health of all older people. The HCPOA has also achieved a number of milestones, including the development of a Level of Intrusiveness Scale for assessing the level of intrusiveness of research study components and predicting the likelihood of recruitment success, defining research benefits, examining the cultural and linguistic requirements of research staff and making available supplemental translators. The proposed recruitment core will continue to support the recruitment and retention of subjects for intervention development studies, pilot projects, and other studies. We will work with the DIDP to provide pre-recruitment education and post-study information dissemination.
The specific aims of the RRCA are 1) To support clinically-based OAIC IDS and pilot projects by providing sources of well-characterized elderly subjects who meet each study's entry criteria; 2) To increase the recruitment of minority populations for clinical research projects; 3) To develop and validate a procedure for the allocation of recruitment resources for grant submissions; 4) To develop new research projects and training activities using the registry database; and 5) To disseminate information to registry participants, and members of the local lay and professional communities informing them of research projects results, foster health promotion and disease prevention practices, attract new members to the registry, and sustain the interest of existing members in future research participation.
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