Learning From Unexpected Results: What the Numbers Didn't Capture (BETTER Women 4/5)

About this episode

The BETTER Women research team gathered to review their findings, hoping to see clear evidence that peer health coaching improved women's preventative health behaviours. But the results told suggested a more complex story. While the quantitative data showed no statistically significant benefit from adding peer health coaches to the program, the qualitative interviews revealed a different picture: participants and coaches described meaningful relationships, increased confidence, and genuine support that simply weren't captured in the measured outcomes.

In this episode, we sit in on the research team's candid debrief as they work through disappointing numbers, examine what might have gone wrong, and discover valuable insights about the gap between what researchers measure and what participants actually value. From volunteer bias to pandemic pivots to goals that don't fit neatly into outcome frameworks, this is an honest look at what happens when research doesn't go as planned—and why mixed or disappointing results are just as important as clear successes.

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More episodes in this series:

• Trailer
• Episode 1: Going “Upstream” to Prevent Chronic Disease
• Episode 2: The Science behind Peer Health Support
• Episode 3: Voices from the Heart of the Project: Peer Health Coaches

Related research:

• Assessing the effectiveness of “BETTER Women”, a community-based, primary care-linked peer health coaching programme for chronic disease prevention: protocol for a pragmatic, wait-list controlled, type 1 hybrid effectiveness-implementation trial
• Improving chronic disease prevention and screening in primary care: results of the BETTER pragmatic cluster randomized controlled trial.
• Results from the BETTER WISE trial: a pragmatic cluster two arm parallel randomized controlled trial for primary prevention and screening in primary care during the COVID-19 pandemic

Links:

• The BETTER Women project
• Canadian Cancer Society
• Women's College Hospital