Auditing research quality issues within the Pro Greens project

Together with Dr. Saskia te Velde, we represent the EMGO+ Institute within the Pro Greens project. Pro Greens is coordinated by Dr. Agneta Yngve of Karolinka in Sweden, and the project is financially supported by the European Commission’s public health directorate. Pro Greens is a follow-up project on Pro Children. Both projects are aiming to promote fruit and vegetable consumption among school-aged children across Europe. In Pro Children informed by a a cross sectional survey conducted in nine countries in North, West and Southern Europe, an intervention mapping exercise was conducted that resulted in an intervention package that was tested in Norway, the Netherlands, and the Basque region of Spain.
Pro Greens build on Pro Children by adapting the intervention to be applicable in different countries, including new European Union member states, and to test these adapted interventions in these countries.
EMGO+ is responsible for the evaluation work package within Pro Greens. This means that we will do the analyses for the effect evaluation of the intervention, but we are also responsible for the internal evaluation of the project. This internal evaluation should ensure good research quality guidance and control across all the participating research teams so that quality standards are complied to, and standardized data collection and management methods are applied.
Part of this internal evaluation is auditing the Pro Greens partners that were not within the Pro Children project. Yesterday I did the first audit at the Folkhälsan Research Center in Helsinki, Finland where I met with the principal investigator of the Folkhälsan team, Dr. Eva Roos and her two associates Carola Ray and Camilla Stoor.

Based on the Research Quality handbook of the EMGO+ Institute, the Folkhälsan team had completed an audit survey before the actual audit and based on this questionnaire we discussed issues regarding sampling, data collection, storage, cleaning and privacy protection, as well as data analyses preparations.