The Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health located in Brooklyn, New York, submits this application. The purpose of the project is to develop a prostate health curriculum guide as a tool to be used in the preparation of barbers for a role as agents of intervention (messengers) in prostate cancer control with their customers. The target communities are within Kings County (Brooklyn), New York. The predominant minority are African Americans, largely low income, and geographically inclusive of neighborhoods that show the highest elevated incidence of late stage prostate cancer in the State (Novello, 2001). The proposed study will develop a curriculum approach (to include a training methodology) critical to the intervention that will reach these target communities. The overall goal of the study is to develop and test the efficacy of the curriculum guide that serves the purpose of significantly improving awareness, understanding, and capability of the barbers to discuss the details of prostate health practices.
The specific aims are: (1) To study the prostate cancer control information needs and communication styles of barbers from three target communities by conducting both an information needs assessment survey and unobtrusive observations with a representative sample of 18 professional barbers; (2) To study the prostate cancer control information base, motivation needs, information receptivity styles and stage of change characteristics of a sample of men served by the barbershops in the three target communities by conducting a needs assessment survey of 90 barbershop customers; (3) To develop a curriculum guide for training coupled with pre and post assessment tools to measure the impact of training to be provided to community-based professional barbers in specific knowledge, attitudes and skills that will equip barbers to deliver stage-sensitive prostate health messages to their customers; (4) To pretest the curriculum guide and assessment tools by conducting three focus groups of 10 barbers each to determine the cultural, linguistic, and content appropriateness of the guide and measurement tools; (5) To pilot test the training curriculum guide by conducting two training sessions of 12 randomly selected professional barbers from the target communities to measure changes in their knowledge, responsiveness to stage characteristics, and self efficacy in the role of messenger, using a time series design, pre, immediately post, and three months post training.
