Lead Principal Investigator: Virginia A. Brown, The Hastings Center

Co-Principal Investigator: Phillip W. Schnarrs, University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health

Co-Investigators: Nancy Berlinger, the Hastings Center; Michael K Gusmano, Lehigh University; John Oeffinger, Texas Health Institute; AI Richmond, Community-Campus Partnerships for Health; Lauren Taylor, NYU; Andrew Yockey, University of Mississippi.

Funder: PCORI

January 2025

This study is the first one to investigate the role of organizational trustworthiness in shaping research engagement processes and outcomes. It will focus on understanding if individuals’ beliefs that universities and other research organizations (e.g., academic medical centers) are trustworthy influences how much they trust researchers they partner with on research projects. This study is important because it will help researchers understand how these beliefs impact trust between researchers and community members who collaborate on research and how to encourage such organizations to act in more trustworthy ways. 

 The study aims to:

• Understand the perspectives of diverse patients and other partners (e.g., clinicians, researchers, community-based organizations) regarding organizational trustworthiness as it relates to research and how these perspectives have shaped interpersonal trust to improve engagement in research.
• Develop and assess a new measure of organizational trustworthiness.
• Examine the observable properties of organizational trustworthiness that the new measure identifies. To do this, the researchers will recruit 1,035 patients and others from past or currently funded PCORI engagement and research projects, PCORnet, and other community-engaged research projects to complete an online survey based on findings from the above two aims.