Table 1.

Strategies for Community-Based Participatory Research Within American Muslim Mosque Communities

Challenge	Recommendation
Establishing Trust: American Muslims can be guarded and mistrustful of researchers outside of the community, particularly after 9/11.	-Utilize religious and cultural insiders to engage mosque leadership and to recruit participants. -Conduct the interviews at the mosque to enhance participant comfort and to legitimize the research project.
Mosque Engagement: Infrastructural support in mosques is often limited, characterized by a mainly volunteer staff, high turnover rates, and limited accountability in governance.	-Utilize the social networks of community partners to facilitate mosque engagement. -Participate in the organizational meetings of community partners, frequent mosques to establish presence of research team, and meet with mosque leaders to develop rapport.
Participant Recruitment: American Muslims may be reluctant to participate in research.	-Employ a variety of recruitment methods including: flyer distribution at worship services, emails on mosque listservs, notices on mosque and organizational websites, announcements made by mosque leaders during worship services and community events, and staffed tables at the mosque, especially during the Friday prayer service. -Provide bilingual study documents and interviewers to overcome language barriers.
Religious Norms: Muslims are instructed to pray 5 times a day, and Islamic teachings about modesty often result in gender segregation in worship and social settings.	-Schedule the interviews around worship services and the five daily prayers to minimize disruption to data collection and to convey respect for religious observances. -Respect gender interaction norms by accommodating preferences for gender concordant interviewers and by segmenting interviews by gender.
Partner Involvement and Sustainability: Many American Muslim organizations are young, underresourced, and lack the appropriate infrastructure to sustain a collaborative research effort.	-Set and articulate realistic expectations for the involvement of community partners. -Create opportunities for relationship building among the community-academic team to increase rapport and group cohesiveness. -Consider providing monetary remuneration to community partners for their time on the project.