We like to share resources that might be helpful to researchers whenever we find them. A recent find comes courtesy of the Multi-Regional Clinical Trials center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard (look under “resources). This group has done some work on, among many other things, the return of research results to participants. Transparency about research findings has been a big topic of discussion in research circles lately, for various reasons. Subjects may feel more invested in research if they know they will be told of research results. The return of results can be tricky, however; telling people about research findings without appropriate context regarding their meaning or significance to their individual situation may not be helpful.
Guidance about and a toolkit for returning aggregate study results to subjects is available here. Some principles pertaining to the return of individual results can be found here. Note that some of these resources require a login; however, the ones that may be most helpful to researchers at large are publicly available.