Prostate Cancer Educational Seminar for African American Men in the South East Region and the Increase of Knowledge about Prostate Cancer

Background: Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death among men in the United States, and African American men especially represent a high risk population for prostate cancer (American Cancer Society, 2016). Although the overall prostate cancer incidence rates have been declining since 1992, the average annual prostate cancer incidence rates among African American men were still higher than any other racial group, and the mortality rates were 2.4 times higher than that of Caucasian counterparts (American Cancer Society, 2016). Despite the potential survival benefit from PSA screening test, however, African American men are less likely to have prior prostate cancer screening history and do not like to participate in free screening (Sammon et al., 2016; S. Weinrich, Boyd, Bradford, Mossa, & Weinrich, 1998). While numerous studies addressed various barriers to PSA among African American males, limited knowledge about prostate cancer and lack of resources in the African American community were frequently referred to as the main reason that deterred them to participate in prostate cancer screening (Forrester-Anderson, 2005). The current project aims at informing high-risk African American men about basic knowledge of prostate cancer and screening such as PSA testing through a community-based educational seminar.

 Methods: The intervention was implemented as a small group educational seminar that lasted approximately 1 hour to 1.5 hours. In order to provide the culturally competent as well as informative intervention, the educational seminars were composed of two parts: the informative part by the experts and a testimony and conversation with an African American prostate cancer survivor. The self-administered short surveys were conducted with a pretest/posttest design to evaluate the increase of knowledge about the prostate cancer. Through the 24 educational seminars, a total of 496 African American males participated in this study. The participants were mostly African Americans (87.1%) with a mean age of 57.7 years (SD=25.9). While 46.4 % of participants were single, 26.4 % of participants were married, and 12% were divorced. Only 20 % of participants were fulltime or part-time employees, and 62.3 % of participants had an annual household income below $29,900.

Results: A paired-samples t-test was conducted to compare the scores of prostate cancer knowledge before and after attending seminars. The preliminary analysis results showed that there was a significant difference in the scores of prostate cancer knowledge before (M=5.47, SD = 2.28) and after (M=6.5, SD=2.26) attending the seminars; t(477) = 10.2 , p <.001.

Implication: The findings suggest that when the social work services are delivered in a culturally appropriate and credible way, they can have significant effects on the minority clients. Future intervention studies for the minority need to consider how to engage local community members in the interventions to improve the effects of the service as well as to reduce the barriers for the research.