16 Motivated by Money? The Effect of Modest Remuneration on Study Recruitment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is an area of intense clinical research, often with competing studies for the preterm patient population. There has been little study of the processes that lie behind the enrollment of patients into these competing studies and the possible effects of remuneration on these processes. The objective of this study was to determine whether financial remuneration for those enrolling patients impacted recruitment and/or consent rates. Following research ethics board approval, the log books for two randomized controlled trials (RCT) conducted concurrently in a tertiary NICU were examined for a 12 month period. Both RCTs examined commonplace NICU therapies (a drug and a ventilation strategy) in infants <1250 grams and were exclusionary. A member of the same research team approached parents of eligible infants for both studies. A modest remuneration for each infant enrolled was given to the research team only for study A. Data collected included birthweight (BW), gestational age (GA), gender and whether the patient was eligible, approached and/or consented to the trials. In the defined period, 80 infants were eligible for both RCTs and an additional 37 infants were eligible for study B. The mean GA was 27 weeks, mean BW 911 grams and 62% were male. As per table one, significantly more parents were approached for study A (p<0.0001). In contrast, of those approached, parents were more likely to consent for study B (p<0.0001). The marked disparity and divergence between the approach and consent rates for these two RCTs leads one to speculate as to possible underlying reasons. One must consider trial design factors such as simplicity of the trial, parental factors such as ease of parental understanding and research team factors such as clinical equipoise and trial interest. Although financial renumeration may have been a motivating factor for approaching parents, it does not appear to have impacted the consent rate. We postulate that the perception of a financial incentive may have caused moral conflict in those approaching for consent, resulting in the research team being even more aware of the need to present trial information to parents in a fair and unbiased manner.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.424 | 0.651 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".