Capturing the Input of Vulnerable and Hard to Reach Populations for a Baby Boomer Model

The San Mateo County Health Department (SMCHD), California, and The Lewin Group developed a model to project future health and social service needs of baby boomers (ages 41-59 in 2005) and young seniors (ages 60-74 in 2005) through 2030. A random digit dial survey served as a key component of the model development. The survey of over 900 county residents focused on topics not available from other sources, such as the likelihood of the respondent remaining in the County in retirement.

However, this method was not successful in sufficiently capturing either the African Americans ,Asian, linguistically isolated and foreign born sub-populations. San Mateo lacked zip codes with high concentrations of African Americans because this population is dispersed across the county of 705,499 people. In addition, it was cost prohibitive to translate the survey to Chinese given the low number of monolingual respondents expected through the random digit dial.

It was important to the project to adequately reflect these populations because their utilization patterns of County services differ when compared to the general population. As a result, the project supplemented telephone survey with in-person interviews and conducted two focus groups with monolingual Cantonese and Mandarin speaking County residents.

This session will present the community involvement strategies for identifying and recruiting survey respondents and focus group participants, as well as the collaboration of community leaders, local churches, multi-lingual County staff, and the project team.