The association between perceived discrimination and breast cancer incidence was assessed in the Black Women’s Health Study.
http://www.bu.edu/bwhs/history.htm#StudyDesign
STARTING THE BWHS
Before seeking National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for the study, we set out to show that out idea was feasible. We decided that a follow-up design was best and developed a questionnaire. The questionnaire asked about age, education, contraceptive use, smoking, and other factors that might be related to health and disease. The National Education Association allowed us to mail questionnaires to a sample of black female teachers; the federal government delivered questionnaires through their personnel offices to a sample of black female employees; and Essence magazine gave us access to a sample of subscribers after we had paid a fee. The completed questionnaires that were returned to us showed clearly that enough black women were willing to provide useful and accurate health information to make a study feasible. After submitting a detailed grant proposal to NIH, review of the proposal, and revision, we received funding. The entire process, from developing the idea and conducting the studies to show that our study would work, to receiving funding for the BWHS, took about four years. With the funding secured, in 1995 we sent health questionnaires to subscribers to Essence magazine, women who had participated in our feasibility studies, members of the Black Nurses’ Association, and friends and relatives of respondents. The 59,000 women who returned completed questionnaires became the members of the BWHS.
HOW LONG WILL THE BWHS LAST?
The BWHS celebrated its 10 year anniversary in 2005. The first NIH grant for the BWHS was for 5 years. The study was continued for a second 5-year period, and again for a further 5 years (until 2009). We will continue to apply for re-funding every 5 years and hope that the study will continue.
Would you say never, once a year, once a month, once a week, once a day, once an hour, or constantly? This question has already been included on the “Reactions to Race” module that was piloted on the 2002 BRFSS. It has also been included on two large postal surveys, the 1995 Nurses’ Health Study II (NHS II with 93,681 respondents, Walter Willett, Principal Investigator) and the 1997 Black Women’s Health Study (BWHS with 53,269 respondents, Lynn Rosenberg and Lucile Adams-Campbell, Principal Investigators).
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...the distribution of frequency of thinking about one’s “race” is almost identical between the black women responding to the 1997 BWHS and the black women responding to the 1995 NHS II, even though these are entirely different groups of women who were queried two years apart. Further note that the distribution of “race”-consciousness for the white women responding to the NHS II differed markedly from the distribution for the black women in NHS II, even though both groups were nurses and they were surveyed at the same time. More than 50% of the white women in NHS II reported that they never think about their “race”, and only 0.3% reported thinking about their “race” constantly. On the other hand, 21% of the black women in NHS II and 22% of the black women responding to BWHS reported thinking about their “race” constantly, and roughly 50% of the black women in both groups reported thinking about their “race” once a day or more frequently. The distribution of frequency of thinking about one’s “race” for Asian and Hispanic respondents to NHS II was intermediate between the black and white distributions.