| In this exploratory, one group pretest-posttest preexperimental study, 62 African American women were evaluated for influence of participation in a culturally-sensitive Breast Cancer Education Program on their help-seeking behavior for breast cancer screening. The other purposes of the study was to examine the relationship between various independent variables such as ethnic identity, breast cancer fatalism, breast cancer fear, breast cancer knowledge, religion and spirituality, mistrust, and other demographic variables on their help-seeking behavior for breast cancer screening. The researcher recruited the women from African American churches in Miami Dade and Broward counties in Florida. Participants completed a 126-item pretest questionnaire prior to participating in the Breast Cancer Education Program (a two-hour PowerPoint presentation, followed by a posttest questionnaire (same instrument). The data was analyzed using SPSS (version 17). Descriptive statistics to describe the sample included frequencies distribution and means.;T-tests, independent samples t-test, and one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) followed by Tukey B were completed to make inferences about the relationship between the independent and dependent variables. Paired-samples t-test indicated that there was a statistically significant correlation between help-seeking of the women following their participation in the Breast Cancer Education Program on research question two. Pearson correlations yielded findings on research question eight indicating that there was a strong correlation between BSE barrier and help-seeking (r=-424, N=62, p=.001) and between BSE benefits and BSE confidence (r=.67, N=62, p=.000.). Other significant correlations were found between perception of susceptibility scale (r=.531, N=62, p=.000) and the BSE barrier scale (r=.272, N=62, p=.032). A multiple linear regression showed that four independent variables measured by the Breast Cancer Fatalism scale, Breast Cancer Fear scale, BSE Barrier scale, and the Health Motivation scale had statistically significantly relationships to the Help-seeking scale (dependent variable) and explained about 45% of the variance in the dependent variable. A new subset of women were observed in this study and their responses were atypical regarding mistrust of the medical community, they were highly educated, religious, spiritual, had insurance, and were more open to help-seeking for preventive care for breast cancer that was anticipated. This new area of findings warrants future research. |
