Exploring beliefs about responsibility for health consultations
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Exploring beliefs about responsibility for health consultations
IRAS ID
346543
Contact name
Lucy Hopkins
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Oxford / Research Governance, Ethics & Assurance
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 11 months, 18 days
Research summary
Health anxiety is a type of anxiety disorder. It is a belief or fear about having a serious illness despite medical reassurance. The main theory of how health anxiety is developed and maintained is the ‘cognitive theory.’ According to this theory, health anxiety occurs because bodily symptoms are judged to be more threatening than they truly are.
This study involves asking people with health anxiety to complete a new questionnaire. The same questionnaire will also be given to three other groups of people: people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), people with generalised anxiety disorder, and community controls (people without any of these anxiety disorders). This amounts to 4 groups in total, and scores across these different groups will be compared. Participants will be recruited from the community (e.g., online), from NHS Talking Therapies (TT) services (primary care NHS services that offer evidence based treatment of depression and anxiety, including health anxiety, OCD and GAD), and from a University of Oxford database of people who have consented to participating in research.
The questionnaire was developed to measure people’s beliefs about how responsible they are for their own health consultations. The research question being addressed is whether this new questionnaire is consistent if repeated at least twice and really does measure what it says it is measuring: beliefs about health consultations among people with health anxiety. Finally, we want to find out whether people with health anxiety score particularly highly on the questionnaire.
This study predicts that people with health anxiety will score more highly on the questionnaire than other groups. This is because research has suggested that ‘responsibility’ beliefs are important for people with health anxiety in a very specific way: people with health anxiety might believe they have a greater degree of responsibility for health consultations.
This study will be the first to explore this belief among people with health anxiety. As with other anxiety disorders, understanding beliefs underlying health anxiety will allow us to focus our treatment work on the most suitable target.
REC name
HSC REC B
REC reference
25/NI/0102
Date of REC Opinion
12 Aug 2025
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion