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This paper presents findings from formative research exploring Black Seventh-day Adventist church members' attitudes about Black non-participation in past studies, and suggestions for recruiting 45,000 Blacks to an upcoming longitudinal cohort study. Data were collected in California and Pennsylvania, using 15 key informant interviews and 6 focus groups. Key findings supported and elucidated existing literature on the barriers to minority recruitment, and included: a general mistrust of the medical/scientific community; a perception that providing informed consent relinquishes, rather than protects, an individual's rights; a perception of being "studied" rather than "studying," due to the paucity of Black investigators; and a perceived lack of cultural sensitivity in the recruitment of Blacks, and in the conduct of the research itself. Building trust throughout the process, from clearly demonstrating the benefits of participation, at the individual and community level, to including Blacks in the study design from conceptualization to data analysis and presentation, emerged as a critical component in garnering Black participation in future studies.

Methods were developed for estimating fine particulates less than 2.5 microns in aerodynamic diameter (PM2.5) from airport visibility data which detected seasonality and allowed for possible site- and season-specific regressions of PM2.5 on visibility. The methods were applied to nine airports in California in order to produce estimates of PM2.5 for the years 1966-1986 based on 1,767 paired PM2.5/visibility data points where PM2.5 had been measured at a monitoring station near the airport. General F-tests indicated that site- and season-specific regression equations resulted in a statistically significant reduction in residual error. The split halves correlation for estimating PM2.5 from visibility over all areas was 0.82. The methods were used to estimate long-term concentrations of ambient PM2.5 for an epidemiological cohort of 1,868 individuals.