Promoting engagement, assessing barriers, and evaluating self-efficacy in yoga research among women from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds
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PROJECT SUMMARY Yoga is a complementary mind-body practice used to prevent and manage a growing array of health conditions that affect women. However, yoga continues to be underutilized by women from racial and ethnic minority groups despite their need for effective and safe complementary behavioral health interventions. Minority women are also dramatically underrepresented in clinical research involving yoga, thus limiting insight into strategies for overcoming challenges to yoga instruction for women from these backgrounds. This administrative supplement is designed to promote engagement, assess barriers, and evaluate self-efficacy among under-represented racial and ethnic minority women participating in a randomized controlled trial of a group-based yoga intervention for women with urinary incontinence that has involved both in-person and videoconference-based waves of yoga instruction. We will use supplemental funds to enhance recruitment of underrepresented minority women through targeted outreach to communities in the northern California area with a higher density of Latina and African-American residents. For upcoming study waves involving videoconference-based yoga instruction, we will loan equipment, provide coaching, and enhance videoconference support to minority women with limited prior experience with digital technology. We will also conduct new analyses to explore whether participant expectations, engagement, and self-efficacy in practicing yoga differ by race/ethnicity, educational attainment, physical function status, and prior experience with digital technology, using structured measures incorporated into the parent clinical trial. We will also conduct in-depth qualitative interviews with a subset of trial participants sampled across multiple racial/ethnic backgrounds to explore barriers and facilitators of their experience of learning and practicing yoga. Finally, we will triangulate findings from qualitative and quantitative data to explore potential mediators of differences in engagement, adherence, and self-efficacy in yoga practice among women from diverse backgrounds. This research will provide new insight into factors influencing engagement of underrepresented racial/ethnic minority women in research on yoga and help guide future strategies to develop, refine, and implement complementary mind- body interventions for women of diverse backgrounds.
