Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Jan 17, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Jan 17, 2019 - Jan 31, 2019
Date Accepted: Apr 5, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Communicating uncertainty from limitations in quality of evidence to the public in written health information: protocol for a randomised controlled trial
ABSTRACT
Background:
Uncertainty is integral to evidence informed decision-making and of particular importance for preference-sensitive decisions. While communicating uncertainty to patients and the public has long been identified as a goal in the informed and shared decision making movement, there is little quantitative research on the issue.
Objective:
We designed this study to examine how different degrees of uncertainty (Q1) and different types of uncertainty (Q2) impact patients’ perception of the effectiveness of a treatment, the body of evidence, text quality, and hypothetical treatment decision. The study will also examine whether there is an additive effect, when multiple sources of uncertainty are communicated (Q3).
Methods:
We developed eight variations of a research summary set in a hypothetical scenario for a treatment decision in the context of tinnitus. These were modified only in the degree of uncertainty relating to the evidence of the presented treatment. Participants will be recruited from an online research panel and randomised to one of eight variations of the research summary in order to examine the three research questions. Outcomes are perception of the effectiveness of the treatment (primary), certainty in the judgement of treatment effectiveness, perception of the body of evidence relating to the treatment, text quality and decisional intention (secondary). We aim to recruit 1500 participants to the trial. The study will be conducted among members of the German public. Ethics and dissemination: Ethical approval was waivered by an ethics committee due to the negligible risk to participants. Results will be published in a peer-reviewed journal, presented at conferences and disseminated among developers of guidance for the development of evidence-based health information and decision aids.
Citation
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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.