Brief Report of a Low-Cost Street-Corner Methodology Used to Assess Inner-City Residents’ Awareness and Knowledge about Asthma

Abstract

The goal of the Philadelphia Community Asthma Prevention Program (CAPP) Collaborative was to reduce the burden of asthma among children (0–18 years) living in underserved neighborhoods with high asthma prevalence by implementing a comprehensive set of community-based asthma interventions. An equally important objective of the collaborative, which included community agencies, the school district, the health department, faith-based organizations, and hospitals, was to increase the community’s awareness of asthma and its capacity to address the problem. CAPP’s components included home environmental remediation and educational visits (784 participants), a series of classes at community sites for children with asthma (303 participants) and caregivers (644 participants), on-site office training for primary care providers and nursing staff (196 individuals), professional asthma education for school nurses and teachers (752 participants), and asthma classes for public school students (901 participants). The collaborative also conducted a communication campaign throughout the life of the project, including notices in neighborhood newspapers, public service announcements on radio stations, postings on community agency list serves, and distribution of flyers to churches, libraries, schools, local clinics, community agencies, beauty salons, and Laundromats. The project focused on a population of approximately 330,000 located in parts of Upper and Lower North Philadelphia, and Germantown. These areas are characterized by blighted housing, overcrowding, drug trafficking, violence, and poverty.1 Initiation of interventions was staggered over a 5-year period (June 2003–June 2008) in 4 area quadrants identified by zip code. After its initiation, each intervention continued throughout the remainder of the project. The CAPP team sought to obtain information related to its focus on community empowerment and broad dissemination of asthma messages. Traditional survey methods may not to yield a representative sample in urban, low-income populations. Formal phone or in-person surveys to gather community data at regular intervals are costly and burdensome. Moreover these methods, as well as internet and mailed surveys, do not reach people who are illiterate, move frequently, or lack land-line phone service.2–5 Therefore CAPP adapted a street-intercept methodology reported by Miller and colleagues6 by using students to administer surveys on street corners in Philadelphia. This paper describes this approach and its results.