Manage Research Operations

Two articles and an editorial address the question of whether paying research participants could be considered coercive. The first article notes concerns about risks, consent, and exploitation. The second article examines coercion as subjection, in which someone’s interests can be partially set back in virtue of being subject to another’s foreign will. The editorial weighs the arguments and views participation as work that should be fairly compensated. Malmqvist E. “Paid to endure”: Paid...

This resource page for cultural competency training focuses on implicit bias, which is an unconsciously held set of assumptions about a social group that affects judgment and decision-making without conscious awareness of that influence. In health care, implicit bias has been associated with disparities in provider–patient communications and relationships. The website provides links to a video series, reports, research articles, and an implicit bias test.

This website provides resources to support effective communications with potential, enrolled, and past participants in clinical trials. The target audience includes sponsors and funders, investigators, study teams, and institutional review boards/ethics committees.

The NIH website, NIH Clinical Trials and You, contains several pages for researchers and trial sites: Improving Visibility of NIH-Supported Clinical Trial Activities and Results : Describes the NIH policy, similar to the FDA “Final Rule” reporting requirement for funded clinical trials: Trials must be registered at ClinicalTrials.gov, and summary results must be submitted no later than 1 year after the primary completion date. Clearly Communicating Research Results Across the Clinical Trials...

This online tool helps patient groups and clinical research sponsors identify high-value opportunities for patient engagement.

The NIH Strategic Plan for Tribal Health Research FY 2019–2023 is designed to improve NIH's relationship and collaborative efforts with American Indian/Alaska Native communities by enhancing communication and collaboration, building research capacity, expanding research, and enhancing cultural competency and community engagement.

This 58-page document provides guidance for engaging stakeholders in reviewing and providing feedback on research questions before a project is implemented.

This study modeled Alzheimer’s disease prevention clinical trials in order to assist investigators in making trial design choices. The authors used data from the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center Uniform Data Set to model trial sample sizes, the numbers needed to enroll to account for dropout, and the numbers needed to screen to successfully complete enrollment. Researchers then examined how enrichment strategies affected each component of the model. For example, enriching for subjective...

In this review, researchers summarize some of the available methods to improve Alzheimer’s disease research recruitment, the available literature to support or refute these strategies, and experiences at the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers. This article also addresses the application of community-based participatory research principles and the use of participant registries to enhance research enrollment and increase diversity of research samples. Grill JD, Galvin JE. Facilitating Alzheimer...

This five-page document presents a standardized retention plan for prevention, symptomatic, and observational trials conducted at the Center for Alzheimer Research and Treatment (CART), Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. The plan describes strategy and tactics designed to keep patients enrolled in clinical trials, and from discontinuing their participation or dropping out. It covers pre-initiation, study start-up, and study initiation phases.