Laura A. Linnan

Lecture Abstract

The North Carolina BEAUTY and Health Project is a collaboration between beauty salon owners, licensed cosmetologists, customers and researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health and the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.  Beauty salons are located in all communities, urban/rural, large/small; and are places where customers have a unique and trusted bond with a licensed stylist. After forming an Advisory Board made up of industry representatives, beauty school directors, beauty product distributors and public health professionals, we conducted three formative research studies (all now published in peer reviewed journals) to explore how to best promote health and cancer prevention messages in beauty salons: focus groups with salon customers, survey of licensed stylists, and observational study in 10 beauty salons, followed by a pilot intervention study in two beauty salons.  Pilot results demonstrated initial feasibility of training stylists to provide health messages, high levels of stylist and customer satisfaction with the intervention, as well as increased knowledge and self-reported behavior change on several targeted health behaviors.  Based on these results, the American Cancer Society provided funding to test health magazines and stylists training workshops as a way of reaching African American women with health information in the context of a large group randomized trial with 40 beauty salons and more than 1000 of their African American customers. Primary outcomes at the customer level (F&V intake and physical activity) and secondary outcomes (screening behavior and weight) were addressed using 7 health campaigns delivered over an 18 month intervention period.  Each campaign (and all related intervention methods/campaign messages) was grounded in social cognitive theory and social marketing principles.  We are still cleaning the data and will explore subgroup analyses, but preliminary results indicate that while no significant differences exist among intervention vs. control customers on most targeted behaviors; salon owners, stylists and customers were highly enthusiastic about promoting health in the beauty salons.  Future studies will consider more carefully how/when to fully engage stylists in the intervention efforts, and will consider varying the amount/type of intervention.  Using community-based participatory research principles, we have secured funding to provide continuing education training credits for licensed stylists who attend state-sponsored training workshops; expanded this model to reach new immigrant Latina salons/customers; and have obtained funding from CDC and NCI to conduct intervention studies to address prostate and colorectal cancer prevention, as well as physical activity promotion, among African American men who attend barbershops.

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