The education hypothesis predicts that Blacks with higher education may be more willing to participate in biomedical research or related activities. We found that education level not only influenced the relationship between attitudes and willingness to participate, but was also directly related with willingness to participate, among Blacks. Lower education may also imply poorer communities, which typically are associated with physical distance from research sites, lack of medical insurance required for participation in some studies, working shifts that are at odds with researchers’ schedules, difficulty in taking time off from work to participate, other time pressures, and inability or unwillingness on the part of researchers to adequately engage these communities (Wendler et al., 2006). Researchers’ inability to recruit Blacks compared with Whites may be further exacerbated by the structural realities of differential educational attainment among Blacks and Whites along with racial and ethnic clustering in residential settings. In the general US population, Blacks, on average, have lower education levels than Whites, with 14.3% of Blacks reporting a bachelor’s degree, compared with 26% among Whites (US Census Bureau, Census 2000 Brief,
