Motivation for Health Information Seeking and Processing About Clinical Trial Enrollment

Abstract

Low patient accrual in clinical trials poses serious concerns for the advancement of medical science in the United States. Past research has identified health communication as a crucial step in overcoming barriers to enrollment. However, few communication scholars have studied this problem from a sociopsychological perspective to understand what motivates people to look for or pay attention to information about clinical trial enrollment. This study applies the model of Risk Information Seeking and Processing (RISP) to this context of health decision making. By recognizing the uncertainties embedded in clinical trials, we view clinical trial enrollment as a case study of risk. With data from a random-digit-dial telephone survey of 500 adults living in the United States, we used structural equation modeling to test the central part of the RISP model. In particular, we examined the role of optimistic feelings, as a type of positive affect, in motivating information seeking and processing. Our results indicated that rather than exerting an indirect influence on information seeking through motivating a psychological need for more information, optimistic feelings have more direct relationships with information seeking and processing. Similarly, informational subjective norms also exhibit a more direct relationship with information seeking and processing. These results suggest merit in applying the RISP model to study health decision making related to clinical trial enrollment. Our findings also render practical implications on how to improve communication about clinical trial enrollment.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Data collection for this study was supported by a research grant from The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. This report represents the views of the authors of this paper and not necessarily the views of the funding agency. The authors thank this journal's anonymous reviewers for their very useful guidance toward improving the paper.

Notes

¹Along with optimistic feelings, we also examined several negative emotions. We decided to focus on a positive emotion for this study because it has not yet been explored in relation to the RISP model. Future articles will include a comparison of the effects of positive and negative emotions.

²Full measures are available from the authors upon request.

³According to Carmines and Zeller (1979), omega provides the closest estimate to the true reliability of the measure (p. 62). We recognize that the reliability coefficients for the information processing items did not meet the minimal standard (.60), for which other scholars have argued (Robinson, Shaver, & Wrightsman, 1991). However, the structural equation modeling technique used in our analysis accounts for potential measurement errors when indicating overall fit of the specified model. These measures are also consistent with past studies based on the RISP model.