Updates on my experience working on the vitamin D study

 Updates on my experience working on the vitamin D study

 

In my previous blog, I described my experience working on the vitamin D research project as part of my Student Selected Component (SCP). This is a project organised by the River Island Academic Centre for Paediatrics and Child Health in collaboration with the Imperial Self-Care Academic Research Unity (SCARU),aiming to find out more about what people in the UK know and think about vitamin D, using an electronic questionnaire. It falls under the category of “formative research”, which is research aiming to gather data useful for the development and implementation of health initiatives(1). In the first week of my SCP attachment, I was mainly involved with the questionnaire, as I described in my last blog entry. In the following three weeks, I continued developing the questionnaire and I also worked on the study protocol, a step necessary to get ethics approval. In this blog, I describe my experience in developing a study protocol and reflect on the importance of formative research. 

 

Writing up a study protocol: 

 

Every research study that includes human participants has to first be approved by an ethics committee. This is because researchers might unintentionally harm participants or obtain personal and sensitive information. It is therefore critical to ensure that research is conducted safely and in an ethical manner. Getting ethics approval requires submitting a study protocol. This is a long document consisting of different sections such as:

·       Scientific background

·       Rationale for doing the study

·       Details of what the study will involve

·       Details of how participants will be recruited

·       Details on the type of information that will be collected from participants and the way it will be stored

·       Benefits and potential risks of participating in the study. 

 

My work in collaboration with SCARU during the second and third weeks of my SCP mainly involved refining the protocol and working on the references. Although I had previously been involved in writing a research protocol for another study, I still found the process very beneficial for different reasons: Firstly, reading what had already been written in the protocol was helpful because it enabled me to gain a better scientific understanding of the topic. At the same time, it allowed me to amend the research questionnaire in order to increase the quality of the questions. In particular, by reading the protocol and having discussions with the rest of the team, I realised that a questionnaire can also prove instructive to the respondent. This can be achieved by adding some context to the questions. For example, instead of asking directly “what is the recommended daily intake of vitamin D in the UK?”, the question can be better phrased by adding a statement such as: “the current NHS recommendations include taking daily vitamin D supplements”. Reflecting on the process of writing a study protocol as a whole, I think that this process can be viewed as an independent scientific piece of work. In other words, while developing a protocol one has to make clear what background research has been done, what is needed to take it forward and how his study is going to bridge this gap. 

The importance of formative research

 

The study I have been working on aims to find out more about what people in the UK know and think about vitamin D in order to subsequently develop initiatives to increase the use of vitamin D supplementation. Understanding what social, cultural and other factors drive the health behaviours of a population is essential in order to change such behaviours. In order for an intervention to be effective, scientists must therefore consider the context in which the intervention will take place. In a simple analogy, a dietician wanting to help a patient lose weight needs to consider his patient’s diet but must also take into account his lifestyle in order to suggest a compatible diet. Likewise, in public health initiatives smaller studies are first designed to make sure that interventions are culturally and socially appropriate. This is an example of formative research and enables researchers to identify barriers and other factors that could affect the outcomes of an intervention, bridging the gap between theory and practice(2).

 

Next steps…

Having completed my SCP attachment I can confidently say that I was left with very positive impressions and feelings. For this reason, I decided to stay longer in the team, and continue being involved in this project. I would like to thank my supervisors Prof. Blair and Dr Tanna, who are leading research at the River Island Academic Centre and Dr El-Osta and colleagues, from SCARU, for their support and I look forward to continuing working with them. 

 

 

 

References:

1.        Gittelsohn J, Steckler A, Johnson CC, Pratt C, Grieser M, Pickrel J, et al. Formative Research in School and Community-Based Health Programs and Studies: “State of the Art” and the TAAG Approach NIH Public Access Author Manuscript. Health Educ Behav. 2006;33(1):25-39

2.        Graf E, Garofalo L, Hundertmark AC, Montague GL, Polash NM, Suskind E, et al. Using Formative Research to Develop a Hospital-Based Perinatal Public Health Intervention in the United States: The Thirty Million Words Initiative Newborn Parent Education Curriculum. The Journal of Early Hearing Detection and Intervention. 2017;2(1):2-11