Dr Gillian Tabor is – In support of anyone doing research!
Anybody involved in research will know that it’s a tough thing to do, whether you have enjoyed or been forced into it within an undergraduate degree or postgraduate degree. Personally, I enjoy conducting and engaging in research that supports my clinical decision-making as much as possible. However, I’m stuck in the middle ground of having strong principles about evidence-based medicine but also understanding that always having research available is unrealistic.
From the outside, research looks like you have an idea, you test it, you write it up, and then you publish it. But there are a few hurdles to overcome at each stage. Usually, our research questions are amazing, they are very grand but they are exactly what we need to know. However, in reality, what looks to be a simple question can often turn out to be a whole PhD!
Generating a good quality research question is the most important starting point and then you have to think, well, how can I answer that question? You need to form a hypothesis and then design a study that is going to give those answers. Sounds simple, right? No! Have you got the equipment to actually measure what you want to do? Have you got access to participants, whether two-legged or four-legged? Have you got the time to carry out the research? And then the tricky final part is whether you have the finances to allow you to carry out this research. In the world of universities, we have limited time, often using our own time, as research supervisors to devote to supervising projects that students run. It’s not common to have anything more than a small bursary to support the small minority of these projects that are actually demonstrating or hopefully predicted to have good outputs. Companies wanting their products tested commonly don’t have budget to fund studies, therefore the resources of time and money are limited.
If you’ve designed your question correctly, you’ll know your methods needed to answer your question and more than likely you will have to go through the ethics process. This varies across institutions, but it usually requires you to produce a research proposal, have strict written protocols describing how you’re going to conduct the research and what effect it’s going to have on the participants. At my institution, that takes a minimum of three weeks from submission of the paperwork to gaining the first reviewers responses, and then subsequent resubmissions if you haven’t quite got it right take longer. In other institutions it might be a quicker process. However, I’m co-supervising a PhD at an external university that requires exceptional detail to both animal and human ethics forms. This is even for relatively small projects such as surveys where there’s informed consent with no or very little risk to participant welfare. When it comes to using animals at that particular institution, they even have to describe worst case scenarios is what should happen if during the conducting the research, the animal is required to be euthanised.
The Ethics Committee process may have taken a long time, but then you need to recruit your participants. Now in an ideal world, and if you’re familiar with the idea of power calculations, we know exactly how many participants we need before we start data collection. Once you have got your number, you need to go and try to find them. But if you’ve only got a month window to collect data, then maybe you’re not going to reach that required number. Or maybe the required number is very high – 350 horses that are Grand Prix dressage trained is not going to be realistic. In defence of all the studies that have eight to 15 horses participating, I think it’s unreasonable to expect all studies to adequately meet their power requirements. Now, I’m not saying that it’s not feasible with the right timeframe and the right finances behind you, but realistically, what’s going to happen in the nine months that a master’s student must complete their research project?
Data collection is fraught with challenges no matter how well you plan, how tight your logistics are, and your timetable is structured. things always happen. If you’re doing a process that requires measurement that should take 20 minutes. The first time you do it, guaranteed it’s going to take 2, 3 or 4 times that long and that needs to be scheduled in. You have got to hope that your participants stick with you through the process of your study.
A lot of papers will show immediate effects because you measure, you do something or have a control period, and then you measure again but what if you’re looking for longitudinal effects? If you’ve got 12 weeks between the start and the finish, keeping people motivated, doing what you want them to do is an immense challenge. And doing it yourself is also going to require more time and your commitment to that duration of the study.
Sometimes people think, I’ll send out a survey and that will get the answers that I want to answer my research question. However, that is not as easy as it sounds, especially post-COVID. We’re suffering from survey fatigue! We see a lot of surveys on the same topic with them coming round again and again, and people are less willing to spend their time filling them in. You might need 300 people to answer your survey, but actually you get 30.
You’ve then got to be able to analyse the data – you’ve got to learn statistics, apply the statistics and interpret the outputs. That is not easy for everyone! With the results you have to come to some form of conclusion and articulate everything in a succinct and scientific manner.
Research is hard work!
If you have got this far with a study well done but what about sharing your information? We want good research to be published because we want it to be available to lots of people to read. There’s also a requirement for some doctoral programmes to actually have pre-published data. And that process again can take months and months.
So, in summary, hats off to you if you are trying to research or you have researched, because you’ll know how it feels and how hard you must work. Well done! Please, if it was good, and you enjoyed it, do it again and again and again, because the more evidence we have, it is only going to be better for welfare of our horses. However, if you never intend to do research, please think leniently towards those who are trying to conduct the best studies that they can, given all the constraints that they have.
