Translating Research to Action & Knowledge (TRAK) Portal: a web-based platform for report-back of research results - Difficulty finding environmental and public health research, in readily usable form, is a major impediment to public's and study participants' abilities to understand and apply those findings to reduce their exposure to environmental hazards and improve health outcomes. Such available report-back of research results (RBRR) requires easily understood and visualized data presentations, dissemination, and overcoming ethical concerns to effective information distribution. This project aims to develop an ethically-sound RBRR approach that can build environmental health literacy (EHL) by creating the novel Translating Research to Action & Knowledge (TRAK) Portal –a web-based, smartphone-compatible tool for study participants and communities. To advance RBRR, our approach aims to effectively serve both individuals and their communities' needs. Earlier we found that study participants want to see how their data compares to those of other populations/geographic regions, and to see their data contextualized both for themselves and their communities. The TRAK Portal will encompass these foundational themes, in a modifiable tool that allows scalability across studies, and will publish open-source code. The project will leverage findings from 17 prior RBRR studies and >900 study participants, to create an interactive TRAK web tool. It will be developed initially to provide RBRR of silicone wristband-based chemical exposure data but will be extendable to scale across multiple data/study types. The project will promote and enable data sharing within and across studies, and will learn directly from RBRR study participants, to inform a qualitatively improved RBRR process and will advance EHL by discovering and thus leveraging people's motivations toward decision-making to reduce and prevent exposures to environmental contaminants. Input from Community and Expert Advisory Boards and Community Engagement Studios will identify preferences, perceived risks and benefits, and facilitators to efficacious RBRR, learning from various populations and by testing the Portal in two current NIH-funded studies: 1) Fair Start – urban cohort; and 2) St. Helen’s – suburban cohort. The project will identify and integrate ethical approaches for RBRR execution.
