Informed decision making about prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing: Findings and implications from formative testing of a multimodal intervention

Abstract

We created the You Decide multimodal intervention to provide men with the information, skills, and reinforcement needed to engage in informed decision making (IDM) related to prostate cancer screening. We developed intervention materials based on three rounds of formative research conducted with 145 members of the intended recipient audience through 10 focus groups and more than 50 individual in-depth interviews. This report documents key findings from our formative research that may apply to the development of other IDM interventions, especially those related to prostate cancer. Our findings underscored (1) the difficulty of promoting IDM for cancer screening given people's high affinity for such screenings, and (2) the challenge of graphically communicating risk-related tradeoffs. We found that pretest participants had a preference for full-story narratives conveying personal experiences and interpersonal learning opportunities. Our formative research findings also supported the need to use plain language to address a range of health literacy levels. We describe our efforts to apply these formative research findings in our final intervention materials and discuss implications for future intervention research. Our findings underscore the importance of involving the intended audience in the process of developing intervention materials.