The Recruiting and Retaining Older African Americans into Research (ROAR) project is designed to develop and disseminate effective strategies to recruit, retain, and promote participation in health-related research among African American older adults. This project builds upon 20 years of successful efforts to engage and provide health promotion programming for older adult community members in Detroit, MI through the Michigan Center for Urban African American Aging Research (MCUAAAR), a collaborative partnership between The University of Michigan, Wayne State University, and most recently, Michigan State University. At the center of the current MCUAAAR research recruitment infrastructure is a Community Advisory Board of African American older adults, housed at MCUAAAR's Healthier Black Elders Center in Detroit, MI. This advisory board meets regularly to review and provide approval for research applications from investigators who want to sample from a Participant Research Registry of 1400 older African Americans in Detroit who have agreed to be contacted to participate in social science research. The advisory board also provides feedback on MCUAAAR community programming and receives instruction on how to evaluate and interpret social science research. The MCUAAAR team, led by Dr. James Jackson and Dr. Jamie Mitchell, will utilize community-based participatory approaches to significantly expand the recruitment and retention capabilities of the current infrastructure by achieving the following three aims with corresponding methods and outcomes. First, we will engage local community partners in order to recruit, train and establish a research advisory board of African American older adults in Flint, Michigan in service of a future Flint Participant Research Registry. Establishing a research advisory board of African American older adults in Flint, Michigan with the support of new and existing community partnerships, will provide the community-driven infrastructure for building a future research registry of older adults in Flint that investigators can apply to utilize similar to the existing Detroit registry. Next, we will gain input from both the existing Detroit and new Flint community advisory boards and other stakeholders on the technological design, content and user interface, resources for male recruitment, and launch of an interactive recruitment website. This website will feature educational resources for the public on research participation, information on how to join the registries, features of NIH-relevant research utilizing the registries, a section targeting men's research recruitment, and administrative tools and best practices for researchers working with minority older adults. Finally, we will evaluate the reach, usability, and acceptability of the website with a range of older African Americans and academic and clinical researchers in three cities in order to demonstrate the strategy's effectiveness with specific populations and how to establishing a new community- based registry and corresponding resources can be adapted for other settings and geographical areas.
The Recruiting and Retaining Older African Americans into Research (ROAR) project is designed to develop and disseminate effective strategies to recruit, retain, and promote participation in health-related research among African American older adults. The Michigan Center for Urban African American Aging Research (MCUAAAR) will utilize community-based participatory approaches to significantly expand the recruitment and retention capabilities of the current infrastructure by expanding a community advisory board and participant registry for African American older adults to a new setting, Flint, MI, developing specific strategies for increasing African American male research participation, and developing a resources rich website to recruit participants, educate the public, disseminate NIH-relevant findings and best practices, and enhance the administrative capabilities of bot the Flint and Detroit Registries. A clinical site in Cleveland, OH will be used to evaluate the adaptation of these strategies for new settings and locations.
