Clinical Trial Preference Study

Leveraging Discrete Choice Experiments to Increase Participant Diversity in Future Clinical Trials

Population subgroups experiencing health disparities are often also underrepresented in clinical trials. These groups include individuals from minoritized racial and ethnic groups, people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and men or women, depending on the study area. Identifying approaches to reduce health disparities will remain stalled until clinical trials can recruit and retain diverse clinical trial participants. To improve recruitment across studies, there is a need to understand how diverse populations view specific clinical trial attributes that could be manipulated to increase interest in trials. To address this need, this project will use a discrete choice experiment to identify and prioritize specific trial attributes under investigators' control that could be leveraged to enhance clinical trial participation rates in underrepresented groups. This project will evaluate participants' preferences of 1) return of full versus limited results to participants, 2) balancing a study's participant burden with its ability to address multiple research aims, 3) incentivizing clinical assessments vs. conducting homebased assessments, and 4) results generalizable to specific social groups versus the broader population. This experiment will be conducted with a sample of potential clinical trial participants (N = 800) that is diverse in terms of self-reported gender, racial and ethnic identity, education, and chronic disease status. The results of this study will be used to design a randomized comparison of enhanced clinical trial attributes across multiple health conditions to evaluate whether using the enhanced trial features can more efficiently recruit underrepresented participants into clinical trials.

Study Overview

• Status: Completed
• Conditions: Clinical Trials
• Intervention / Treatment: Other: Discrete choice experiment

• Study Type: Observational
• Enrollment (Actual): 801

Contacts and Locations

Study Locations

• United States
  • Illinois
    • Chicago, Illinois, United States, 60612
      • Rush University Medical Center

Participation Criteria

Eligibility Criteria

• Ages Eligible for Study: Adult; Older Adult
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers: Yes

• Sampling Method: Non-Probability Sample

Study Population

United States adults

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

• Internet access with audio and visual capabilities
• Reside within the United States
• Read and speak English

Exclusion Criteria:

• Under 18 years of age
• No internet access
• Reside outside of the United States
• Do not read and speak English

Study Plan

How is the study designed?

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure	Measure Description	Time Frame
Participant preference for clinical trial attributes	Utility values generated from multinomal logit estimates from a discrete choice experiment of 8 hypothetical choices (Trial A, B, or neither).	Baseline

Collaborators and Investigators

• Sponsor: Rush University Medical Center
• Collaborators: National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK)

Study record dates

Study Major Dates

• Study Start (Actual): May 28, 2025
• Primary Completion (Actual): September 4, 2025
• Study Completion (Actual): September 4, 2025

Study Registration Dates

• First Submitted: November 25, 2024
• First Submitted That Met QC Criteria: December 11, 2024
• First Posted (Actual): December 16, 2024

Study Record Updates

• Last Update Posted (Estimated): September 11, 2025
• Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria: September 4, 2025
• Last Verified: September 1, 2025

More Information

Terms related to this study

• Other Study ID Numbers: ORA# 24021303; R03DK139135 (U.S. NIH Grant/Contract)

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

• Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?: UNDECIDED
• IPD Plan Description: Data will be made available in the Open Science Framework. Data will be made available as soon as possible after the data collection period has ended and will occur after the study investigators have had reasonable time to prepare manuscripts.

Drug and device information, study documents

• Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product: No
• Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product: No
• product manufactured in and exported from the U.S.: No