Reframing personal and community report back of consumer products

Chemical exposures from consumer product use can affect exposures and health outcomes across the life course. This study seeks to support study participants to better understand their results from consumer product chemical exposure studies while also moving the report back field from right-to-know to right-to-understand. We also seek to advance methods for sharing of research results through a toolkit that will advance environmental health literacy on report back. We will leverage the Taking Stock Study, an ongoing community-based, research study, to address the following aims: 1) analyze community experiences of receiving personalized study results, and through collaborative inquiry, move from right-to-know to right-to-understand.; 2) develop and test an enhanced report back process for an intervention study that centers ethical dilemmas; and 3) develop a community-level report back toolkit to support environmental health researchers to be better equipped to tackle ethical concerns related to consumer product exposures, including when there are no safer alternatives. We will recruit participants from the first phase of the Taking Stock Study who will have already received personalized study results reports to learn from their experiences including what they wanted, what they understood, and what was lacking during the report back process. We will use this feedback and usability testing with a subset of participants to iteratively refine the personalized study reports generated with Silent Spring Institute’s Digital Exposure Report-back Interface (DERBI) for the second phase of Taking Stock, which is an intervention study. We will test the refined reports among Taking Stock participants by evaluating environmental health literacy outcomes, including knowledge, understanding and motivation to act before and after receiving DERBI reports. We expect to develop new frameworks, tools, and empirical evidence on how to advance a right-to-understand report back paradigm to support environmental public health.