This paper will describe specific efforts to recruit urban Native American gravidas into a study envisioned to gather comparable data about drinking during pregnancy between understudied and hard to reach urban minority women (African and Native American), using similar recruitment strategies and the same time frames, with a maximum interest sampling strategy required to isolate the urban Native women. Most Native American studies have gathered information from rural reservations though Indian's lives are becoming increasingly urban, mobile and heterogeneous. Data were gathered from 1996-1998 as a pilot component of the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism center grant to the Alcohol Research Group in Berkeley. The Office of Minority Health provided supplemental funding. A sample of 102 Native American and 186 African American pregnant women were interviewed. A subset of women interviewed in their first trimester was re-interviewed in their third trimester. Attempts were made to match ethnicities of respondents to interviewers. Diverse recruitment strategies including clinics, snowball referrals and community outreach settings were required to reach the Native sub-sample, a hidden population in the urban settings being sampled, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. Women were recruited through urban health clinics, urban Women Infant and Children clinics (WIC), urban Native American health centers, and other exhaustive outreach including urban powwows, mailings, posters, ads placed in numerous Indian newspapers, and extensive personal contacts with urban Native leaders. Cultural sensitivity and appreciation were exercised in all contacts.
Learning Objectives: Partipants will learn: 1. successful steps to recruit hard to reach pregnant minority urban women, especially urban Native American women. 2. identify locator information and field work techniques needed to find hard to reach urban minority women for third tirmester follow-up interviews. 3. evaluate lessons learned about being culturally aware. During this session, the persentor will describe how 321 pregnant urban women were recruited into a study that measured drinking habits and exposures to warning messages about drinking during pregnancy. The empahsis will be on the recrutiment methods and not the study aims or outcomes, with emphasis on the urban Native American sample for whom least is known
Keywords: Minority Research, Native Populations
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: None
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.