Increasing participation in research with therapy dogs: A qualitative study at a large urban mental health and addiction hospital
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The benefits of involving patients as partners in research across diverse medical and psychiatric settings are well established in the literature. However, researchers continue to struggle to access, engage and retain participants from hard-to-reach populations. The main objective of this study was to co-create pet therapy activities with patients admitted for serious and complex mental illness to a large urban mental health and addiction hospital. Informed by the principles of participatory action research methodology, we conducted focus group discussions with 38 inpatients in seven different clinical units. An experienced volunteer handler and a certified therapy dog helped facilitate our discussions. Participating researchers, recreational therapists, volunteer handlers and our participants all reported that the presence of a certified therapy dog at each of our discussions was integral to their success. Certified therapy dogs increased the motivation to participate in our study, helped to build rapport with participants and created connections in our discussions that enriched our data. To our knowledge our study is the first to demonstrate the value of using a therapy dog as a participatory research tool in a healthcare setting. The authors believe that therapy dogs are a low-tech intervention that could be used effectively to engage hard-to-reach populations in research about their treatment and care in a diverse range of medical settings. These findings support the creation of a pilot study to test the value of including therapy dogs in patient-centered research with vulnerable and hard-to-reach populations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".