Podcast Interview Transcript
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Welcome to Progress in Community Health Partnerships’ latest episode our Beyond the Manuscript podcast. In each volume of the Journal, the editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscript post-study interview with the authors. Beyond the Manuscript provides the authors the opportunity to tell listeners what they would want to know about the project beyond what went into the final manuscript. The associate editor who handled the articles conducts our Beyond the Manuscript interviews. In this edition of Beyond the Manuscript, Associate Editor Erin Kobetz interviews Irma Robbins, Joan Bloom, and Kim Engelman, authors of “Targeting and Tailoring Health Communications in Breast Screening Interventions.”
Hi everyone. My name is Erin Kobetz and I am an Associate Editor for the Progress in Community Health Partnerships and I’m honored to talk to you today about your manuscript, “Targeting and Tailoring Health Communications in Breast Screening Interventions.”
The first question that I have is for Dr. Joan Bloom from the Alameda County Network Center to Reduce Cancer Disparities. Joan, I’m interested if you could tell me a little bit more about the third component of your intervention design. I was really curious when a husband could be invited, and whether you could explain that in further detail. I was curious whether this was only the choice of the participant and what you did if a woman wanted her husband to come but the husband himself refused participation.
Some of those eventualities did not occur. The reason why we decided to ask the wife if the husband would be on it was because in the Muslim religion there’s a real division in roles. And we wanted to make sure that it was okay with the wife for the husband to participate and that she would be the best person to ask him first before we contacted him officially. As it turned out none of the women refused their husbands to participate, so that turned out to be a non-issue. But we didn’t know that when we got started.
I’m wondering if it would be useful for our readers if you just want to give two or three sentences background about what your research was hoping to accomplish before I ask any additional questions. I probably should have started with that, and I apologize for not doing so.
Our project focused on Afghan women who are generally Muslim. In fact, I think it’s almost 100 percent Muslim. And we were focused clearly on the religion and the religious precepts and those are somewhat different. The Muslim culture is a lifestyle as well as a religion and so we’ve been very sensitive to that and most of my colleagues working on the project are Muslim so that has been foremost. Our project was to increase breast cancer screening among Muslim women and so that was our main focus of the project. [End Page 91]
And the intervention—we had three interventions, essentially—our main intervention and two follow up interventions. The main intervention was an education program that lasted two hours and was run by lay health educators who we trained to run the education session. Most of the Muslim immigrant women that participated do not speak English or have very limited English ability, even though some of them have been here as many as 30 years. And they mostly have very low education levels so they are illiterate in their own language. So the intervention consisted of a lot of activities that they could participate in, including story-telling, looking at a breast model to see if they could feel for the lumps even though we weren’t teaching that particular skill but just to give them the vision of that. And often these women never looked at their own breast in the mirror so they never looked at themselves without their clothes on, so it’s a very different kind of culture.
In addition to that, we had community health educators, also lay members of the community who we...
