Sharing Housing Exposure Lessons: 
Transparent and Ethical Reporting (SHELTER)

The SHELTER study’s focus is developing guidelines to address the ethical challenges that research teams may face when reporting back individual research results to participants in home-based environmental exposure studies.  We have three objectives: 

1. Explore the diverse characteristics of household exposure research scenarios that may raise different ethical issues.   
2. Develop a tool to elicit participant preferences for report-back, integrating input from former study participants.  
3. Create a toolkit to help researchers responsibly report-back individual home exposure research results.  

SHELTER is supported by the National Institutes of Health as part of a cohort of eight studies examining various aspects of report-back to participants in environmental health research. These National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences newsletters describe past work on report-back and the current research cohort:

• Grantees create framework to report back environmental health results
• Researchers chart a path forward for report back