PROJECT SUMMARY
Population subgroups experiencing health disparities are often also underrepresented in clinical trials. These
groups include individuals from minoritized racial and ethnic groups, people from lower socioeconomic
backgrounds, and men or women, depending on the study area. Identifying approaches to reduce health
disparities will remain stalled until clinical trials can recruit and retain diverse clinical trial participants. To
improve recruitment across studies, there is a need to understand how diverse populations view specific
clinical trial attributes that could be manipulated to increase interest in trials. Prior studies have identified
personal benefits (including access to medical care; incentives) and societal benefits (advancing science) as
motivations for joining clinical trials. Participants are also more likely to enter trials with high trust and
transparency and where participant burden is minimized. Beyond this basic understanding, it is unclear how
trial attributes preferentially impact trial participation rates in various underrepresented groups, particularly for
trials focused on disease prevention. To address this need, this project will use a discrete choice experiment to
identify and prioritize specific trial attributes under investigators’ control that could be leveraged to enhance
clinical trial participation rates in underrepresented groups. Discrete choice experiments are a low-burden,
efficient methodology widely used in health economics and pharmacology to quantify target groups’
preferences for variants of a given program or product. The application of the discrete choice experiment
methodology to identifying participant preferences for clinical trial components, especially for trials focused on
prevention, is entirely novel. This project will evaluate participants’ preferences of 1) inclusion of a community
advisory board, 2) return of full versus limited results to participants, 3) balancing a study’s participant burden
with its ability to address multiple research aims, 4) incentivizing clinical assessments vs. conducting home-
based assessments, and 5) results generalizable to specific social groups versus the broader population. This
experiment will be conducted with a sample of potential clinical trial participants (N = 600) that is diverse in
terms of self-reported gender, racial and ethnic identity, education, and chronic disease status. The results of
this study will be used to design a randomized comparison of enhanced clinical trial attributes across multiple
health conditions to evaluate whether using the enhanced trial features can more efficiently recruit
underrepresented participants into clinical trials.
