Veteran Voices in Research: Better Science

Summary: Veteran Voices in Research showcases the people and programs that foster Veteran engagement and demonstrates how Veteran collaborators improve the quality, relevance, and impact of VA research. This issue, "Better Science," explains the value of engaging Veterans early in the research process by allowing them to help shape the study in the design phase.

Dr. Brian Lund, CADRE Investigator, solicits feedback from the CADRE-ORH Veteran Engagement Panel.

Some errors aren't caught through academic or clinical training. Sometimes, to know what's relevant and what's a waste, one has to have lived through it.

Agnes Jensen is a Navy Veteran working as an engagement facilitator at the Minneapolis VA's Rehabilitation & Engineering Center for Optimizing Veteran Engagement & Reintegration. She's also part of HSR's Pain/Opioid Consortium of Research. Her job is to help create the bridge between the researchers' theoretical ideas and the Veterans' practical experiences before the study even starts, which introduces efficiency and prevents wasted time.

"Is this vignette scenario realistic?" she asks. "Does this ring true to you? Is this something that would actually happen to a military member?"

Jensen works with Veterans to take early drafts of questionnaires and scientific measures and shape them into something that will resonate with the Veteran subjects in the study. It's a step that many research staff throughout HSR have found essential to make VA's research studies truly valuable.

"Garbage in, garbage out. Who wants to put garbage into a million-dollar research study?" said Gala True, PhD, a researcher with VA's South Central Mental Illness, Research, Education, and Clinical Center. "(For more than 18 years) I've had Veterans point out that a measure wasn't asking the question in the right way, and that I wasn't going to get the answer I was looking for. Veterans are subject matter experts, so ask the experts."

"You might have a nice suite of data, but there may be some aspect of the Veteran experience that simply isn't being captured in those fields," said Kimberly "Max" Brown, PhD, co-director of Equity and Engagement Capacity Building at HSR's Center for Health Evaluation, Research, and Promotion. "You won't know (what is missing) unless you include a discussion with Veterans at some point in your project."

By engaging with Veterans early, VA researchers can improve their study design, making the data more rigorous, accurate, and exhaustive. It ensures research questions are grounded in what matters to Veterans. When doing qualitative work, health systems researchers can then use vignettes to prompt participants for their reactions, perceptions, and beliefs about specific situations.

Kenda Steffensmeier, PhD, a researcher and director of Veteran Engagement for HSR's Center for Access and Delivery Research and Evaluation at the Iowa City VA Medical Center, added she has seen not only the tangible effects Veteran engagement has on the quality, relevance, reach, and impact of health systems research, but also on the integrity of VA.

"You're asking people to give their data and be studied, and that's a powerful position to be in, because then you decide what you do with the data," she said. "To me, it is ethical and moral that the people whose data you are going to be using are involved in how it's going to be used."

The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the Department of Veterans Affairs or the United States government.