Abstract B10: Prevalence of culturally tailored cancer messages in African-American churches

Abstract

Objectives: 1) To examine the frequency of culturally tailored cancer messages present in African-American churches; 2) to examine the prevalence of culturally tailored cancer messages by cancer topic, type of media used, and media source.

Method: Between July 2010 and June 2013, health-related print media were collected from 21 African-American churches in South Carolina (n=2,166). Content analysis methodology was used to code items as having culturally tailored messages or not. A review of the literature aided in the creation of a codebook used to determine whether items were “culturally tailored” to the African-American community. The Cohen's kappa for this codebook was 0.74. These data were added to a previous codebook, which provided definitions for media types, media sources, and messages related to disease including cancer (Cohen's kappa=.89). Pearson's chi squared tests were conducted to determine the frequency of culturally tailored messages by cancer topic, type of media, and media source. We focused on the three most prevalent types of media (i.e., flyers, booklets/brochures, and magazines) and media sources (i.e., local health organizations, national health organizations, and church-made items) providing cancer messages in the dataset.

Results: Of the 316 cancer messages, 118 (37%) were culturally tailored to African Americans. Cancer messages were significantly more likely to be culturally tailored than other types of disease messages (37% vs 19%, p<.001). When type of cancer message was examined, cervical cancer and prostate cancer messages were significantly more likely to be culturally tailored compared to other types of cancer messages (cervical: 56.4% vs. 34.7%, p=.009, prostate: 75.3% vs 21.5%, p<.001). Alternatively, breast cancer messages were significantly less likely to be culturally tailored compared to other types of cancer messages (31.3% vs. 44.0%, p=.02). Cancer messages printed within booklets and brochures (16.7% vs 44.8%, p<.001) were significantly less likely to be culturally tailored compared to other types of media. However, cancer messages printed within magazines (83.1% vs. 26.8%, p<.001) were significantly more likely to be culturally tailored compared to other types of media. Lastly, cancer messages published by national health organizations (17.7% vs. 43.9%, p<.001) were significantly less likely to be culturally tailored compared to other sources of cancer messages.

Conclusion: Over one-third of cancer messages in this dataset were culturally tailored. However, the prevalence of culturally tailored messages differed across cancer sites, types of media publishing cancer messages, and sources of media. Additional research is needed to understand how these differences may impact cancer prevention and control behaviors among African Americans.

Citation Format: Shaila Strayhorn, Brook Harmon, Andrew Carter, James Hebert. Prevalence of culturally tailored cancer messages in African-American churches [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Tenth AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2017 Sep 25-28; Atlanta, GA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2018;27(7 Suppl):Abstract nr B10.