Lack of reliable, affordable transportation is a common barrier to clinical research participation, potentially contributing to health disparities. Insufficient and/or nonexistent institutional policies on research-related transportation make it challenging for research teams to effectively overcome transportation barriers and promote research participation among people from disadvantaged backgrounds. This study’s goal was to review research-related transportation policies across clinical research-involved institutions and propose recommendations for what such policies should address to help promote research engagement among diverse, representative populations.

We surveyed 28 recruitment sites, members of the National Institutes of Health-funded Healthy Brain and Child Development Consortium, poised to recruit over 7000 families, and completed an online search for each site’s policies relevant to research-related transportation (i.e., transportation of participants or research staff travel to/from research activities). We identified, reviewed, and thematically described content of the relevant policies and developed summary recommendations for institutional guidance components.

We identified seven policies (from five sites) on research-related transportation; four provided guidance on research-related transportation services; two on reimbursement; and one on when research staff transports participants. The online search identified publicly available business travel policies for 22 sites. No policy addressed research staff travel specifically for “study business” or research personnel transporting children for research purposes.

Few institutions involved in clinical research have policies guiding research-related transportation. Such policies, if adopted, could help support research-related transportation and, thus, participation of individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds, increasing generalizability of research results and contributing toward reducing social and health disparities.

Participant recruitment and retention (R&R) are well-documented challenges in longitudinal studies, especially those involving populations historically underrepresented in research and vulnerable groups (e.g., pregnant people or young children and their families), as is the focus of the HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) birth cohort study. Subpar access to transportation, overnight lodging, childcare, or meals can compromise R&R; yet, guidance on how to overcome these “logistical barriers” is sparse. This study’s goal was to learn about the HBCD sites’ plans and develop best practice recommendations for the HBCD consortium for addressing these logistical barriers.

The HBCD’s workgroups developed a survey asking the HBCD sites about their plans for supporting research-related transportation, lodging, childcare, and meals, and about the presence of institutional policies to guide their approach. Descriptive statistics described the quantitative survey data. Qualitative survey responses were brief, not warranting formal qualitative analysis; their content was summarized.

Twenty-eight respondents, representing unique recruitment locations across the U.S., completed the survey. The results indicated substantial heterogeneity across the respondents in their approach toward supporting research-related transportation, lodging, childcare, and meals. Three respondents were aware of institutional policies guiding research-related transportation (10.7%) or childcare (10.7%).

This study highlighted heterogeneity in approaches and scarcity of institutional policies regarding research-related transportation, lodging, childcare, and meals, underscoring the need for guidance in this area to ensure equitable support of participant R&R across different settings and populations, so that participants are representative of the larger community, and increase research result validity and generalizability.