Building Community Capacity for Local Level Data Collection

This session will describe program syllabus, class format, participant recruitment, and operational issues of the Delaware Cancer Disparities Scholars Program (DCDSP). DCDSP was developed to begin building community capacity for conducting community based participatory research (CBPR) for the Delaware Cancer Consortium.

The curriculum included both didactic and experiential learning components. The five hour classes were conducted over eight Saturdays.

The community face-to-face household survey designed and conducted by Sinai Urban Health Institute in 2006 was presented to the Wilmington, Delaware community survey team for their review, comment, and editing. Much discussion ensued as the survey was tailored for the surveyor's communities.

Since the goal of the survey was to oversample for Hispanic data, special emphasis was placed on recruiting bi-lingual, bi-cultural Hispanic individuals. The Hispanic cancer survivor group, facilitated the American Cancer Society – South Atlantic Division provided the single largest group of Scholars. Both Henrietta Johnson Medical Center (HJMC) and Westside Health Center assisted in the recruitment of Scholars by sharing the program announcement with their employees.

By the end of the program, 20 surveyors were fully trained. Attendance of most Scholars was high. Of these, two were Spanish-speaking only, 17 were bi-lingual, and one was English-speaking only. Together, they administered 150 complete in-person surveys to residents of a section of Wilmington, DE where the poorest, least educated, most linguistically-isolated, highest-risk residents were most likely to live.