Qualitative methods can bring additional dimensions to pragmatic research to help study teams better understand participants’ experiences, improve recruitment and retention, and contextualize study results. At the NIH Collaboratory’s 2026 Annual Steering Committee Meeting, we spoke with Emily O’Brien and David Chambers about the ways researchers can use qualitative methods to enhance pragmatic trials.
“It’s been really fun to see all the different ways the investigators [for the NIH Collaboratory Trials] have incorporated qualitative methods to complement the other kinds of methods they use in their studies,” said O’Brien, an associate professor of population health sciences at Duke University and cochair of the NIH Collaboratory’s Patient Centered Outcomes Core.
O’Brien highlighted the experience of the MOMs Chat & Care Study, in which the research team used narrative interviews, a method of qualitative data collection that asks participants to produce in-depth stories to describe their experiences.
“This is going to be really helpful in contextualizing the results and trying to understand better which populations the intervention works well for and, if they can improve the intervention in the future, what that might look like,” O’Brien said.
“One of the main challenges in integrating qualitative data into pragmatic clinical trials is that there are so many ways you can use qualitative data,” said Chambers. Chambers is deputy director for implementation science at the National Cancer Institute.
“You can use it to refine an intervention, to understand the results better, to improve your recruitment strategies,” he said, “so it’s really about prioritization and trying to figure out how to identify the highest-value opportunities to collect those data and make sure the study is informed by whatever you’re finding from the qualitative data.”
In the coming weeks, we will share more highlights from the 2026 Annual Steering Committee Meeting. Access the complete meeting materials.
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