医学研究用語に対する一般市民の認知度・理解度調査　―インターネット調査結果からの考察―

抄録

In this study, we conducted an internet survey to understand the public's “recognition rate” and “understanding rate” of medical research terms. We chose to consider basic 12 medical research terms. In the recognition rate survey, for each of the 12 research terms, respondents were asked to select one of the following responses: “I understand its meaning”, “I have heard of it“, and “I have never heard of it”. We defined “recognized” with the answers “I understand the meaning” and “I have heard”. Further, the understanding rate survey was conducted such that the respondents selected one of five options that they thought were the correct explanations of the terms.

We obtained 1002 valid responses (response rate, 12.8%), and the results for each term were as follows (the figures in parentheses indicate the recognition rate and the understanding rate) : clinical studies (88.9％, 18.0％), chiken (85.4％, 14.5％), epidemiological studies (54.6％, 4.3％), intervention studies (10.9％, 2.5％), prospective clinical studies (12.8％, 2.0％), cohort studies (4.2％, 0.7％), phase Ⅰ clinical trials (10.0％, 2.6％), informed consent (55.2％, 9.9％), ethics review committees (66.8％, 23.7％), double-blind clinical trials (6.8％, 2.4％), placebo (20.8％, 14.2％), and randomized clinical trials (22.3％, 6.4％).

The results revealed that most of these medical research terms had a low recognition rate and also that the understanding rate was very low, in general. Consequently, researchers should understand that the public is unfamiliar with these medical research terms and, hence, should carefully explain to the research subjects the terms relevant to their research in the informed consent process.