Expanding effective report-back of environmental exposures among new researchers and clinic-based studies - PROJECT SUMMARY
By reporting back to study participants on their personal biomonitoring and environmental
exposure results, researchers can advance environmental health literacy (EHL), empower
individual actions to reduce harmful chemical exposures, activate civic engagement in
policymaking, respect right-to-know ethics, and improve study recruitment and retention.
Despite this report-back is not yet a widespread practice in environmental health. We
hypothesize that barriers to report-back include limited funding, inexperience, and concerns
about participant worry. In line with the diffusion of innovation theory, we expect that a training
program will expand researcher knowledge of report-back ethics and methods and increase
their willingness and ability to engage with this form of community-based research. We also
hypothesize that involving clinicians with little previous training in environmental health will result
in broadly accrued benefits, including improved clinical outcomes and clinician-patient
relationships, heightened study engagement, and increased EHL for both health professionals
and patients. This study will use semi-structured interviews and pre- and post-tests to pursue
three specific aims: 1) Identify factors that hinder and promote report-back for individual studies
and federally-funded programs; 2) Evaluate a program to train researchers to participate in
report-back; 3) Develop effective strategies for engaging health practitioners in report-back and
assess outcomes for clinicians and patients. This research is innovative because it is the first to
study the considerations of investigators who do not report-back, as well as the perspectives
and experiences of funding agencies that support this research, so that guidance and tools can
be developed and evaluated (Aim 1). Furthermore, our project will create a model of report-back
for the large number of federal programs and funding that support environmental health
measurements in clinical settings, including mega-cohorts like ECHO, the NIEHS’ Superfund
Research Program, and NIH’s All of Us (Aim 2). By partnering with pregnancy and early
childhood cohort studies focused on low-income populations and communities of color, the
proposed project will allow us to develop guidance on reporting back for vulnerable populations
and sensitive periods of development, an understudied area of research. The proposed
research is significant because it will increase researcher and clinician knowledge of report-
back, help surmount barriers to its adoption, develop new methods to evaluate its effectiveness,
encourage the development of federal guidance and policies on report-back, and advance
NIEHS’ strategic goal to translate data to knowledge to action.
