Recruitment methods for pregnancy trials should focus on building women's trust in the trial, and on enhancing women's self-efficacy so they feel able to meet trial requirements. Suggestions for building trust include investing time in open, honest discussion of the risks and benefits of participation, improving visibility of the research team, testimonials from previous participants and advertising study safety and ethical conduct. Self-efficacy can be enhanced by training research staff in empowering styles of communication enabling women to feel heard and supported to problem-solve. These strategies could be implemented relatively easily into pregnancy trial protocols, and their effectiveness tested through their impact on recruitment rates.
BACKGROUND The outbreak of novel viruses like COVID-19 creates many uncertainties for scientists, political leaders, and communities alike. In the absence of an effective vaccine or treatment for COVID-19, it is population-level behavioural changes, such as hand washing or self-isolation when symptomatic that are central to reducing transmission. Health authorities are faced with the challenge of how best to communicate appropriate behaviours to mitigate the risk to the public. It is crucial to understand not only the best ways of communicating this information but also how populations might respond. AIMS To conduct a rapid review to identify and synthesise evidence relating to: a) What characterises effective public health messages for managing risk and preventing disease during public health crises? and b) What influences people’s responses to public health messages about health risk communication? FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS Key recommendations should be considered when designing and delivering public health messages: engage communities in the development of public health messaging, using credible and legitimate sources, address uncertainty immediately and with transparency, focus on unified messages from all sources, and develop messages aimed at increasing understanding, inducing social responsibility and empowering personal control. Embedding the principles of behavioural science into public health messaging is an important step towards more effective health risk communication.
(1968) suggested that some people smoke in order to dose themselves with nicotine and pointed out that a cigarette smoker has "literally finger-tip control of how much nicotine he takes into his mouth." Thus it is possible that smokers may unconsciously adjust their nicotine dose to some desired level, and for this reason it was of interest, as part of the larger study, to investigate the smoking behaviour of subjects given cigarettes with filters of differing retention efficiency for nicotine. To obtain a given quantity of nicotine from a cigarette with a high-retention filter the smoker would need to take more puffs or longer and deeper puffs than if he were smoking a cigarette with a less efficient filter.
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