Acceptability of interventional materials: public participation in public health interventional research

The uptake rate of colorectal cancer screening remains insufficient in France and decreases as the level of deprivation increases. Participants’ health literacy appears to be an important determinant of screening uptake.

The aim of this study, nested in our multicenter-randomized controlled trial, was to present the development and acceptability of interventional material (training and a pictorial brochure) for general practitioners and healthcare users in disadvantaged geographical areas using a participatory involvement approach.

The development of the brochure and the training was carried out in three stages, two for the development, usability, and acceptability testing and a third for its evaluation with the target audience. We used a qualitative approach based on focus groups and cognitive interviews. The qualitative analysis was based on Morville’s “Honeycomb” conceptual model and the COREQ checklist.

The development and test of the acceptability of the material enabled us to adjust the content of the training by proposing examples that were more rooted in professional reality, and to produce a brochure that was easy to read, understand, acceptable and adapted to the intervention’s targeted audience.

This experience illustrates in a concrete way the feasibility of public participation and its value in the context of interventional research, and more generally in the creation of interventional material.