What does engagement mean to participants in longitudinal cohort studies? A qualitative study

Abstract

Background Engagement is important within cohort studies for a number of reasons. It is argued that engaging participants within the studies their involved in may promote their recruitment and retention within the studies. It is also thought that participant input can improve study designs, make them more acceptable for uptake by participants and aid in contextualising research communication to participants. Ultimately it is also argued that engagement needs to provide an avenue for participants to feedback to the cohort study and that this is an ethical imperative. This study sought to explore the participants’ experiences and thoughts of their engagement with their birth cohort study. Methods Participants were recruited from the Children of the 90s (CO90s) study. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 42 participants. The interviews were transcribed verbatim, and uploaded onto Nvivo software. They were then analysed via thematic analysis with a constant comparison technique. Results Participants’ experiences of their engagement with CO90s were broadly based on three aspects: communication they received from CO90s, experiences of ethical conduct from CO90s and receiving rewards from CO90s. The communication received from CO90s, ranged from newsletters explaining study findings and future studies, to more personal forms like annual greeting cards posted to each participant. Ethical conduct from CO90s mainly involved participants understanding that CO90s would keep their information confidential, that it was only involved in ‘good’ ethical research and their expectation that CO90s would always prioritise participant welfare. Some of the gifts participants said they received at CO90s included toys, shopping vouchers, results from clinical tests, and time off from school to attend data collection (Focus) days. Participants also described a temporality in their engagement with CO90s and the subsequent trust they had developed for the cohort study. Conclusions The experiences of engagement described by participants were theorized as being based on reciprocity which was sometimes overt -in receiving gifts from CO90s and other times more nuanced- for example through CO90s ethical conduct. This perceived reciprocity aligns well with Maussian conception of gifting and in this case espoused participants’ trust in the cohort resulting in a unique participant-cohort study relationship.