Research Goes Viral - Listening to our audiences: Why we changed our name

Author: Sarah Walsh (29/03/2022)

Viruses, the diseases they cause, and scientific research investigating them affects every person on the planet. At the MRC – University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, we believe that everyone should feel empowered to engage with science and research in a way that maximises its benefit for everyone. That is why, in 2015 we set up the ‘Contagious Thinking’ blog – a platform for our researchers to communicate their work, and its importance, with the wider public with the aim of improving public health and understanding of science.  

With over 60 blog posts and podcasts, on topics ranging from gene therapy to SARS-CoV-2, Contagious Thinking raised awareness of the CVR’s world-leading research for nearly 7 years. We have aimed to make the blog as inclusive as possible, helping us to reach the widest possible audience and share our research with as many people as we can. To continue to do this effectively, we need to ensure that we are inclusive, and provide a space that is fully accessible.  

As part of an ongoing project at the CVR we recently held a focus group between some of our researchers, and a group of people living with a blood-borne virus (e.g., Hepatitis C virus [HCV] and HIV) to explore the language and stigma surrounding these viruses. In this meeting, we asked researchers to share the words they use to describe their research when speaking to a lay audience (first word cloud below) and we asked our peer group (people living with HIV and/or HCV) to share the words that they do not like being used to describe themselves or their condition (second word cloud below).  ‘Infection’ and ‘infected’ were shared by both groups, and most of the words shared by the peer group centred around the stigma surrounding transmission.   

This interaction has led us to review the language we use when discussing our research and ask, “are we being as inclusive as possible?”. Words such as ‘contagious’ and ‘infectious’ contribute to negative stereotypes about people living with viral infections and increase the stigma we are working so hard to reduce. To this end, we have decided to relaunch the CVR blog as ‘Research Goes Viral’, a name we believe is more inclusive and captures what we hope all research at the CVR will do… go viral!