About this session

Saturday, 10:20 AM - 11:50 AM

Engaging Families in Science: Effective and Ethical Report-Back of Environmental Health Research Results

Parent and child research participants invest their time in advancing developmental science. Despite their vital contributions to advancing science, many parents complete their research participation without receiving information on the data they’ve provided, including data on potentially harmful environmental exposures. Reporting individual research findings is becoming more common in environmental health science and other fields, but report-back also raises significant ethical and practical considerations. This symposium highlights studies of approaches and best practices for returning individual research results to parents and youth. We also consider other areas of developmental science that might benefit from responsible report-back of research results.

The first paper explores parental guilt and prenatal exposures, focusing on the challenges of reporting research findings during critical developmental stages while adhering to ethical principles of respect for autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. The second paper explores the effects of providing individual-level data from personal air monitoring to adolescents and their caregivers. This study engaged participants in co-developing a report-back document that included personalized exposure results, visualizations, and strategies for reducing air pollution. The third paper emphasizes the ethical obligation to return research results to study participants, highlighting that many participants reported a significant increase in their knowledge of environmental exposures, and almost all participants were glad to receive their data. The discussant will connect these papers’ focus on report-back of environmental health information to parents and youth with the fulfillment of the goals of SRCD’s Strategic Vision, especially Goal 1 to “advance cutting-edge and integrative developmental science research.”

Paper #1
Title	Parental guilt and prenatal exposures: challenges in reporting research during developmental stages
Presenting author	Diana Rohlman, Ph.D., Pacific Northwest Center for Translational Environmental Health Research; Oregon State University, United States

Paper #2
Title	The Benefits of Providing Personal Air Sampling Results to Study Participants
Presenting author	Patrick Ryan, Ph.D., Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Department of Pediatrics, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, United States

Paper #3
Title	Return of research results as a critical component of engagement and retention in longitudinal research
Presenting author	Julie Herbstman, Ph.D., Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health, Columbia University, United States

View all paper details

Session chair
Rebecca Krawczak, Wayne State University, United States

Discussant
Christopher Joseph Trentacosta, Ph.D., Wayne State University, United States

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