How Frequently and in What Format Are Research Trial Results Disseminated to Participants? A Survey of Trialists and Response Questionnaire Trial

Questionnaires are frequently used in online research, however recruiting, and completion rates of online participants from a variety of cultures and demographic backgrounds can be challenging. The challenge is greater in an online cohort because there is no way to observe the participant beyond what is contributed online. Poor recruiting and completion can result in underpowered research that may not be representative of the sample population. This can trigger an increase in costs as the recruitment period may have to be extended until sample size is reached. When recruiting and completion rates are inadequate studies may have to be terminated and the answer to the research question can remain unknown.

To mitigate these challenges, reminder emails are sent to questionnaire respondents. There is uncertainty about how the tone of the email reminder affects the proportion of recruitment rates.

A nested randomized trial will be used to test the intervention of tone delivery in survey email reminders to establish an evidence base. This study (ResponseQT) proposes to link with the anticipated 20,000 person international cohort study, (How Frequently and in What Format are Research Trial Results Disseminated to Participants: A Survey of Trialists (ResponseQT) to explore the evidence of effect for the research question, "Does the tone of a survey email reminder affect the proportion of survey participants recruited. The population will consist of researchers who have published a clinical trial indexed in Pub Med in 2014-15.The intervention is the tone of questionnaire email reminders and the outcomes will be the proportion of participants recruited after invitation (partial plus complete responses) following reminder 1 and 2.