RESEARCH Open Access Reporting to parents on children’ s exposures to asthma triggers in low- income and public housing, an interview- based case study of ethics, environmental literacy, individual action, and public health benefits Laura J. Perovich 1,2* , Jennifer Liss Ohayon 2,3 , Elicia Mayuri Cousins 4 , Rachel Morello-Frosch 5 , Phil Brown 3 , Gary Adamkiewicz 6 and Julia Green Brody 2 Abstract Background: Emerging evidence about the effects of endocrine disruptors on asthma symptoms suggests new opportunities to reduce asthma by changing personal environments. Right-to-know ethics supports returning personal results for these chemicals to participants, so they can make decisions to reduce exposures. Yet researchers and institutional review boards have been reluctant to approve results reports in low-income communities, which are disproportionately affected by asthma. Concerns include limited literacy, lack of resources to reduce exposures, co-occurring stressors, and lack of models for effective reporting. To better understand the ethical and public health implications of returning personal results in low-income communities, we investigated parents’ experiences of learning their children’s environmental chemical and biomonitoring results in the Green Housing Study of asthma. Methods: The Green Housing Study measured indoor chemical exposures, allergens, and children’s asthma symptoms in “green”-renovated public housing and control sites in metro-Boston and Cincinnati in 2011–2013. We developed reports for parents of children in the study, including results for their child and community. We observed community meetings where results were reported, and metro-Boston residents participated in semi- structured interviews in 2015 about their report-back experience. Interviews were systematically coded and analyzed. (Continued on next page) * Correspondence: perovich@media.mit.edu 1 MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA 2 Silent Spring Institute, Newton, MA, USA Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2018 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Perovich et al. Environmental Health (2018) 17:48 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12940-018-0395-9