Most materials used to educate children and adolescents about clinical trials do not account for their developmental abilities and interests. When children receive information about your clinical trial that is neither interesting nor understandable to them, they may feel confused or apprehensive about participating in your study, which could negatively impact your participation rates.
DigiKnowIt News includes various types of educational experiences that are designed to appeal to children with different learning styles, developmental abilities, and interests, so they can choose how they want to learn about research and your study. By communicating with children about research in unique, developmentally-appropriate ways, DigiKnowIt News helps children feel more confident and prepared to decide about whether to participate in your study.
For example, DigiKnowIt News is one of the first websites about clinical trials designed specifically for children and it is also one of the only websites we have located that contains a library of videotaped interviews with young people who have been a participant in a clinical trial. This educational strategy accounts for the fact that children and adults seek out the advice of peers when making a wide range of life decisions. In fact, children have reported that they would prefer to hear from peers, rather than adults, about their experiences participating in a clinical trial.1
The DigiKnowIt News team applied these basic research findings to designing the building blocks of the website by creating a series of videotaped interviews, called “Spotlights,” with children and adolescents about their experiences being a participant in a clinical trial. In this way, children could hear from their peers, who may serve as role models regarding participation in a clinical trial. Some potential participants may view similar-aged peers as more trustworthy sources of information about clinical trials than other sources who might have not been in a clinical trial before. In addition, the Spotlights include a diverse group of youth including children and adolescents, boys and girls, and children who vary in terms of their race and ethnicity, so that youth can personally relate to the people in the videos.
Youth discuss a variety of topics in the videos including why they decided to participate in a clinical trial, how they knew the clinical trial would be safe, what kinds of questions they suggest asking before participating in a trial, how they stayed calm whenever they became nervous during their participation, and more. These perspectives from young people go beyond just educating youth on basic information about clinical trials to empowering youth and helping them feel confident when making a decision about whether or not to assent to participate. During the development of DigiKnowIt News, youth who had previously participated in a clinical trial reported on what information they would have liked to have known prior to participating, so that the DigiKnowIt News team could incorporate as much beneficial information for youth as possible into the questions and answers in the videotaped interviews.
A main goal in the development of DigiKnowIt News was to create an informational resource that would appeal to a wide array of youth with different learning styles and developmental abilities, so that DigiKnowIt News would be effective for use with a diverse group of children and adolescents.
If you would like to start using DigiKnowIt News to educate children about research, so they may feel more comfortable and confident when making the decision to participate in your study, click here to get started.
- Martin-Kerry JM, Knapp P, Atkin K, et al. (2019) Supporting children and young people when making decisions about joining clinical trials: Qualitative study to inform multimedia website development. BMJ Open 9: e023984