Culturally responsive recruitment of Black daughter-mother dyads through community engagement

Black Girls Move is a 12-week, race-conscious, multicomponent, mHealth obesity prevention intervention for Black 7th-10th grade daughters and their mothers. The complex experiences of Black female adolescents and adults necessitate tailored recruitment and retention strategies to address structural, programmatic, and interpersonal barriers to participation. We outline culturally responsive recruitment and retention strategies, lessons learned, and their implications.

A review of recruitment literature highlighted trust-building as essential. We utilized guidelines for evaluating recruitment feasibility in pilot studies and the Community-Informed Recruitment Plan template of diverse populations as frameworks to assess and refine our recruitment and retention approach.

Key findings included: (1) trust was critical for sustaining participant relationships from screening to baseline, (2) weight eligibility criteria were overly restrictive, (3) recruitment targets needed adjustment to prevent school loss, and (4) competing demands impacted engagement. Refinements involved consulting community leaders and an expert community research consultant, leading to (1) broadening eligibility criteria to include daughters of all weight statuses and 7th-8th graders; (2) increasing incentives to align compensation with time commitments for surveys; and (3) hiring a community health worker to address communication and scheduling issues while fostering trust.

Strengthening trust, expanding eligibility, and improving incentives enhanced recruitment and participant engagement. We found this culturally tailored, race-conscious approach was valuable in refining recruitment strategies. Future studies should test the guidelines for evaluating the feasibility of recruitment and the Community-Informed Recruitment Plan template of diverse populations in a large-scale randomized control trial.