Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Utilizing Digital Methods in Public Health Research: Tutorial on Designing and Implementing a Fully Digital Study at Scale
ABSTRACT
The increasing accessibility and capability of technology is enabling researchers in public health to move beyond paper-based data collection methods and adopt digital methods for study recruitment, communication, and data collection and management. Both home-grown and commercial options, including data collection forms, as well as automated communication and data processing software, are integral to studies of all scales in both academic and non-academic settings. While incorporating these methods requires an initial investment of time and resources, they have the potential to improve the quality and efficiency of the aforementioned processes. Furthermore, digital methods enable studies to be more streamlined and innovative, while also generating more secure records for ongoing queries. However, little is known about potential effectiveness and logistics of using integrated digital approaches in large-scale physical activity research. The purpose of this tutorial is to present a single case-study of a current National Institutes of Health (NIH)–funded R01 physical activity research study that has embraced and implemented digital methods (e.g., quick response code, cloud storage, e–surveys). This tutorial is designed to provide practical guidance for successfully designing and implementing state-of-the-art digital methods in a multistage human research study. We share lessons learned regarding implementation and highlight potential limitations of integrating digital methods in public health research.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.