I’ve experienced a renewed interest in Q&A thanks to Quora .

Founded in 2009 by former members of the Facebook team, Quora is a repository of high-quality questions and answers. Not an oxymoron.

The quiddity is that you become valuable on Quora not by dint of the number of followers you have, but through the quality and reputability of your answers. This is possible because users tie their answers to their real names and real-life credentials. Let’s say you want to know about what it’s like to work at Google. Someone from Google will answer the question and cite his experience. It’s win for the asker, who can cut through the speculation, and win for the answerer, who builds his brand and credibility. It’s been said that the catalogue of questions and answers you accumulate through a Quora identity becomes a functional resume — a LinkedIn that actually means something.

It remains to be seen whether the quality of Quora can be sustained as the userbase scales. Currently the site relies heavily on moderation by the redoubtable Admin Team, as well as the vim of its whip-smart cadre of early adopters (think pretty much all of Silicon Valley), but I have high, high hopes.

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As I use Quora and other sites like it, I’ve been thinking: might ResearchMatch (see my previous post) provide more value by adding high-quality Q&A?

Consider Ebay’s Q&A, which you can harness to learn more about an item. Is it really vintage? Any tears, stains, scratches? We’re smart consumers and we want to know before we “buy in”.

Research studies are, likewise, about buying in. The challenge: to translate the passerby who may be staring down your call-for-participants poster — weighing the value proposition in their heads — into the engaged participants sitting in your lab.

Having gone through the process myself, I think we can do better Q&A. IRB’s traditional approach is to have investigators think up all the questions that the patient might ask, write up answers, and send them to the prospectives. If there’s anything we haven’t covered, the subjects can contact us. Generally, these pre-emptive questions are written to high standards; the ethics boards do a great job of making sure we do. But I have no idea if they reflect the reality of a parent’s concerns. I have no idea whether other prospectives share these concerns. Moreover, we provide this very nebulous “space” of “Call/email us!” for the potential dialogue to reside.

When I contemplate a better “space” for the dialogue, I think user-voted FAQ. I’ve taken a few screencaps of Quora to show how this might work.

There would be a home page for each “open” study, like a Quora topic page (see above), established by the Principle Investigators.

• The user is presented with a feed of “Open Questions”, and a feed of “Best Questions”.
• Anonymous prospectives add questions; they can also answer one another’s questions and vote answers up or down.
• Answers remain anonymous, except for those contributed by the Principal Investigators.

At any point, the PIs can create an Answer Summary, synthesizing the best of the answers and providing some citations:

Another feature I’d like to borrow from Quora is the ability to “follow” a question.  The Options menu additionally provides the machinery to tweak privacy and even redirect the question.

A word on client privacy — yes, even anonymous posts may not be enough. So this would work best in an existing framework with proven protections, such as the NIH’s ResearchMatch system, mentioned above.

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Essentially, in this post I wanted to throw an idea out on how we can address participant concerns in more efficient and more engaged manner.

A dynamic user-curated FAQ would be informative, engaging, and help to eliminate redundancy.

There’s a barrier to any act or choice, and taking part in research is no exception. Maybe you really are itching to know: “Why is the cure for cancer so elusive?” It may be a natural corollary to: “Will study X at Y university really help?” But how many people would ask? Where would they ask? And who would answer?

Take a look at any of the popular medical questions on Quora right now. The answers are a great cross-section of who’s available in online communities. We have medical students, health care workers, PhDs, and lots of (much-needed) people who have good old fashioned common-sense and life experience. People who can provide authentic perspectives on research participation. I feel like it would be missing out not to take advantage of that, as long as we also provide controls for PIs to vet the information.

Additional Resources:

Health Is Social: Why Physicians and NPs Should Consider Quora

DivaBioTech: Why Quora is Perfect for Life Sciences and Health Care

KevinMD: Quora in Health and Medicine, What Doctors and Nurses Need to Know

Related posts:

• More ResearchMatch, Please: On Social Media for Recruitment of Research Participants