Public Engagement with Clinical Trials: What and How?

Supervisors: Dr Katie Gillies (Health Services Research Unit) and Dr Heather Morgan (Institute of Applied Health Sciences)

Background to the project:

Clinical trials and health services research rely on the voluntary participation of people. Potential participants are usually approached about the trial by clinicians or research nurses. One common reason given for withholding participation involves fear of one or more aspects of research process(es). Public engagement is the interface between research and wider society. By helping to bring these two sometimes disparate worlds together, relationships can be built to increase trust, relevance, accountability and transparency of, and in, research purposes and process(es), and researchers themselves. Engagement is also important because it can empower people to offer their insights into and feedback on our work to help ensure that the research we conduct is relevant and accessible to the societies in which we live and are striving to improve. Identifying what public engagement activities focussing on clinical trials have been conducted, and how these were operationalised and evaluated, will help to understand and target future activities to improve participation by identifying what works and what doesn’t, for whom and why.

Proposed research and techniques:

The overall aim of this mixed methods research project is to generate public focussed strategies for public engagement with clinical trials that are implementable by UK Trialists. There will be opportunities for the successful candidate to develop and refine research objectives in collaboration with the supervisory team. It is likely they will cover identifying and evaluating the range of methods, both published and not, currently used for designing and delivering public engagement with clinical trials and developing a strategy to deliver and implement effective public engagement with clinical trials activities. Techniques will involve systematic literature searching (including of grey literature) and synthesis of identified articles, consensus methods, questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. There will also be an aligned programme of public engagement activities.

Useful previous experience for the studentship:

An undergraduate degree in a relevant discipline or experience of research methods and running a research project. Specific research skills can be developed throughout the project, but any prior knowledge of systematic reviewing (quantitative and qualitative), semi-structured interviews, questionnaire design, and consensus methods would be an advantage. Any experience of previous public engagement with research/science communication would also be beneficial.

Application:

Please select ’Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Applied Health Sciences’ from the list of programme options in the University of Aberdeen’s online postgraduate applicant portal to ensure that your application is passed to the correct school for processing. Then manually enter the name of the supervisor(s), project title and funder (Elphinstone) in the space provided.