Sample

Participants in 10 Keys–APPRISE were invited from among people who regularly attended senior center events and people attending community health and wellness events. Flyers announcing the program were displayed at the local Area Agency on Aging, senior centers, and other venues, as well as announced in monthly senior community newsletters, newspapers, and public service announcements.

Participants in the program were not required to complete questionnaires or answer questions beyond the Pennsylvania Department of Aging’s enrollment requirements. As a quality assurance effort, participants were invited to complete a prevention knowledge quiz anonymously at the start and end of the program, in which they also provided basic demographic information (sex, age, race [white, black, Asian, other], and ethnicity [Hispanic, non-Hispanic]). They could also complete, again anonymously, a short questionnaire on current prevention behavior. We were able to match pretest and posttest quizzes and prevention behavior reports because sites generated their own identifiers for participants. The research team did not have access to personal identifiers.

Toward the end of the project, we invited participants to sign a consent form for telephone follow-up to assess incorporation of prevention behavior into daily routines. This component of the research was reviewed and approved by the institutional review board of the University of Pittsburgh.