Colorectal Cancer in African Americans

According to the American Cancer Society, the third leading cause of cancer related deaths for African American men and women is colorectal cancer (CRC). African Americans have a higher CRC mortality rate than White men and women due to lack of preventative testing, increased cancer fatalism attitudes, decreased knowledge of the cancer, and late onset diagnosing. To research how to resolve this issue the “Fayetteville Area Inter-Faith Commitment to Colorectal Health and Cancer Reduction in African Americans,” or “The F.A.I.T.H Project” was created to execute a culturally targeted faith/community-based educational intervention about CRC within the African American community.

The sample included 539 participants belonging to community-based organizations and Black churches. The criteria an individual had to meet to partake in this experiment included; African American that was 50 years of age or older, a resident within the Fayetteville/Cumberland county, willing to participate in both the faith/community-based educational program and the telephone follow-up interview to discuss their screening, and able to provide both verbal and written consent. Ultimately, the participants were assigned into two groups, an immediate intervention group or a delayed control group. While the control group did not receive the educational program initially, they were invited to receive it three months later. The participants were asked to fill out pre-test questionnaires in order to obtain personal and medical demographic information, as well as to evaluate their knowledge about colorectal cancer, whether or not they had screening in the past, and cancer fatalism attitudes. This same test was given to participants after the experiment as well.

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...hers developed and should be used for further investigation of the issue. There were some limitations that should have been examined, however, to make this experiment more effective. One concern is that the sample allocation was not random, because people were able to choose which group they wanted to be in. These individuals could have picked the immediate intervention group because they care more about their health than others in the community. Another issue was the dada analysis because the groups were so vastly different in size and the delayed group did not give an adequate amount of demographic information for comparison. Yet, the researchers did a good job in ethical considerations by guiding their experiment with the principles of principlism. They also had a clear purpose of the research and what problem they were trying to identify and find a solution for.