AANCART Research Project on Lay Health Workers and Asian Americans

Overview

This is a behavioral research study to evaluate the effectiveness of a type of health education, lay health worker (LHWs), on increasing the use of a routine health behavior, colorectal cancer (CRC) screening, among Asian Americans, who underutilize such screening. Using quantitative and qualitative methods and a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach, the project will develop and implement a group randomized controlled trial to evaluate LHW effectiveness in promoting CRC screening among Asian Americans age 50 to 75. The investigators will conduct focus groups and individual interviews with community participants to revise training and survey materials developed in prior projects. The investigators will recruit LHWs to be randomly assigned to the intervention arm and to the comparison arm. The LHWs will each recruit 15 participants from their social network. Intervention LHWs will be taught to teach their participants about CRC screening through 2 outreach sessions and 2 telephone calls aimed at increasing their CRC screening receipt. LHWs and participants in the comparison group will receive a bilingual CRC brochure as well as 2 lectures on healthy nutrition for cardiovascular health delivered by a health educator and an optional post- intervention LHW outreach session on CRC screening. Effectiveness of the intervention will be measured by pre-intervention and post-intervention surveys of community participants' CRC screening behaviors. The investigators will also conduct ethnographic observations of LHWs and their participants during the small group sessions and post- intervention focus groups to understand how such a health education approach may work.