Breast and cervical cancer control among Pacific Islander and Southeast Asian Women: participatory action research strategies for baseline data collection in California.

Background: No data exists on the breast and cervical cancer screening practices among Cambodian, Laotian, Thai, and Tongan women. In this article, we describe the efforts required to conduct a baseline survey among these non-English-speaking women using the participatory action research (PAR) approach.
Methods: We tailored small population sampling techniques to each of the populations in partnership with Community Health Outreach workers.
Results: A total of 1825 surveys were successfully conducted in 8 communities.
Conclusion: PAR and the culturally based techniques used to conduct the survey proved successful in maintaining scientific rigor, developing true community-researcher partnership, and achieving over 99% participation.