An application of the Theory of Planned Behavior within a living organ donation education intervention for American Muslim communities: a pre-post evaluation.

The disparity between supply and demand for life-saving and life-sustaining donor organs disproportionally affects ethnic and racial minorities, which is partly due to negative attitudes and beliefs regarding transplantation. One way to address these disparities is to implement targeted and tailored behavioral interventions among minority communities, such as the American Muslim population. We designed, implemented, and evaluated a religiously tailored, ethically balanced, and mosque-based educational intervention within the USA. This intervention increased participants' biomedical and religious knowledge of living organ donation, self-perceived preparedness to make a donation-related decision, and self-reported likelihood to donate a kidney. This paper assesses whether these reported outcomes can be explained through the Theory of Planned Behavior. Our intervention positively impacted living organ donation-related behavioral, normative, and control beliefs-independent of sociodemographic factors. These changes were partly associated with changes in the intention to perform donation-related behaviors. Most significantly, a positive change in behavioral beliefs increased participant's self-perceived likelihood to donate a kidney during their lifetime. These findings support the application of the Theory of Planned Behavior to educational interventions on organ donation in religious communities and could support those seeking to design theory-driven educational interventions for Muslim minorities in other western contexts.