Over the last two years we have blogged about our work exploring different groups of non-participants at cervical screening (aka the smear test). We have shown that women who do not attend for their smear test can be either unaware of screening, unengaged with screening, undecided about screening, intending to get screened (but not yet got around to it) or they may have decided not to get screened.

In our most recent study funded by Cancer Research UK and published in Psycho-oncology, we interviewed women aged 26-65 years (n=29) from these different ‘non-participant’ groups to gain a deeper understanding of their screening decisions. We found that there are differences in the salience of particular barriers to screening, for example women who intend to get screened often focus on more practical barriers to screening and women who have decided not to attend often focus on past negative experiences of screening. However, there were also examples where even within groups of non-participants women had quite varied views e.g. some decliners felt the smear test procedure was not something they wanted to do, even though they knew the risks, other decliners thought smear tests were no big-deal but didn’t think they needed one because they weren’t at risk of cervical cancer.

Our findings also suggested that the distinction between different non-participant groups is ‘fuzzier’ than we originally thought. For example, many of the undecided women described not really wanting to have a smear test, but feeling less strongly about this than decliners. For women who intended to get screened, there were some that did not really want to attend, but felt they ought to (more similar to decliners or undecided women), while other intenders were happy to have a smear but practical barriers stopped them from participating.

This ‘fuzziness’ could mean that distinct interventions for one type of non-participant group may not work for some people in that group, but might work for others classified in a different way. Alternatively, there may be one intervention that could be successful across groups for different reasons, for example HPV self-sampling could address practical barriers (relevant to intenders) and concerns about the screening procedure (relevant to some decliners).