PEARL: A Guide for Developing Community-Engaging and Culturally-Sensitive Education Materials

David Haynes, Kelly D. Hughes, Annette Okafor

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

Community outreach and engagement has been a regular activity of the National Cancer Institute at its designated Cancer Centers. However, in 2016, community outreach and engagement became a required activity for all cancer centers. Yet there is a gap in the literature that provides guidelines for developing materials that resonate with communities. We developed the PEARL rubric to fulfill that gap from our work developing culturally sensitive breast cancer education materials for African American and Immigrant African women. We conducted a targeted literature review to understand the approaches that have been used for developing education materials for communities. We reviewed the literature and distilled key elements into our PEARL guide for creating culturally appropriate education materials. PEARL consists of five elements: Plain language and understandability, Explicit data, statistics, and graphs, Affirmative framing, Representative content, and Local connection. PEARL is a modern comprehensive guide that researchers can use for creating culturally sensitive materials. It is designed to guide researchers develop educational materials who have little to no experience in community engagement.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)666-673
Number of pages8
JournalJournal of Immigrant and Minority Health
Volume25
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2023

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work is funded by National Cancer Institute (Grant No. T32CA163184) and the National Institutes of Health Clinical and Translational Science Award at the University of Minnesota UL1 TR002494.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Keywords

  • African Americans
  • Breast cancer
  • Cancer education
  • Cultural sensitivity
  • Health literacy
  • Immigrants

PubMed: MeSH publication types

  • Review
  • Journal Article

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