While the cancer incidence among Hispanics is generally lower than the cancer incidence among non-Hispanic whites, the proportion of cancers diagnosed in advanced stages is greater. A need exists to create solutions for the development of culturally appropriate and literacy sensitive cancer communications regarding screening, early detection and prevention and to effectively penetrate this information within the Hispanic community. An increased understanding of community members' information needs is required to fuel such initiatives. Currently, there are few available data that provide baseline information with regard to cancer perceptions and priorities and communication preferences and practices, necessary to develop relevant cancer communication initiatives in the community. Therefore, the overarching goal of this two-year exploratory project, entitled REACH (Relevant Education and Communications for Hispanics), is to develop an appropriate questionnaire for assessing cancer information needs. This project builds upon an existing strong research partnership between the Moffitt Cancer Center and the Puerto Rico Cancer Center and brings together a strong interdisciplinary team that aims to positively impact the health of underserved Hispanic and low literacy populations.
Specific aims are: To conduct and analyze a series of focus groups to explore cancer information needs among Puerto Ricans residing in Hillsborough County, Florida and San Juan, Puerto Rico. It is expected that insights gained from the focus groups will inform the development of the questionnaire domains relating to perceptions of cancer information needs and priorities and communication preferences and practices. To develop a draft of a Spanish/English questionnaire using systematic planning methods and a series of iterative processes. ? This will be accomplished through a review of existing questionnaires, relevant literature, infusion of key findings from focus groups, evaluation of content validity, and application of continual improvement steps including cognitive evaluation and learner verification techniques. It is expected that the use of systematic processes will yield information about understandability, cultural, literacy, and linguistic acceptability, validity, and attractiveness of the questionnaire. To pretest the questionnaire among a sample of Puerto Ricans in Hillsborough County, Florida and San Juan, Puerto Rico. ? It is expected that pretesting will yield important information about overall reliability (test-retest procedures) and questionnaire flow. It is anticipated that this project will yield a questionnaire that can be exported and used in larger community-based intervention studies with minor modifications. ? ? ?
