Measuring socioeconomic position in clinical trials
Supervisors:
Professor David McAllister ,School of Health & Wellbeing
Dr Robert Heggie ,School of Health & Wellbeing
Dr Peter Hanlon ,School of Health & Wellbeing
Summary:
Randomised controlled trials (hereafter trials) are becoming increasingly important across social care, education and the criminal justice system. They remain the key research tool in medicine and healthcare.
Crucially, because trial participants are randomly allocated to one of two or more groups (eg an intervention and a control group), fair comparisons across groups can be made, and the effects of interventions can be estimated reliably.
However, trials may not be equally useful for everyone in society. They commonly suffer from unrepresentativeness; older people, women, some ethnic groups, people with multiple conditions and frailty are less likely to be trial participants. This undermines their reliability for informing decision making, leading to less equitable outcomes.
Addressing underrepresentation with respect to socioeconomic position is especially challenging because of under-reporting (trials rarely report socioeconomic measures for participants) and inadequate measurement (the major trial data standards do not cover socioeconomic measures). Using a combination of complex data analyses, simulation studies and stakeholder agreement, this PhD project determine the potential benefits and pitfalls of incorporating different measures of socioeconomic position into trials.
The candidate will develop broad skills in research, from design, through academic writing, to public engagement as well as specific skills in researching using large complex data, including data management, epidemiology, statistical analysis.