edge regarding the symptoms of prostate cancer, and number of incorrect beliefs regarding the effects of screening on sexual functioning will each be correlated with subjects' ages in order to determine whether age is systematically related to these variables.
The need for a study of whether race is related to men's reluctance to seek routine prostate cancer screening cannot be over-estimated. In the United States alone, over 200,000 American men develop prostate cancer each year (Mainous & Hagen, 1994) and black males comprise a disproportionately large percentage of these diagnoses (McCoy and associates, 1995).
Furthermore, one of the key factors in the successful treatment of prostate cancer is early detection; in other words, the likelihood of being cured of cancer is greatly increased if men undergo routine prostate cancer screening (Mainous & Hagen, 1994). If this study determines that beliefs about the effects of screening on sexual functioning are reducing African-American men's chances of having
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