if you need more people for a follow up im more than willing to help. good luck with this, seems like alot of work :) x
Thanks :D It is a lot LOT of work but I'm eager to do it :D
Quote:
Originally Posted by x_Patch_x
Did it :)
Interesting study.
Thanks. I also think it's interesting. This way it's easier for me to write my thesis :D
Quote:
Originally Posted by livelaughlove
I'm about to do the questions and I would love to help with anything else you need. It's a very interesting research project.
Thank you. I already pm'ed you.
Quote:
Originally Posted by stefanp
I just finished the questionnaire.Try and tell me the results if you have time,Please.
Thanks. The results will take some time but I once I have them, I'm gonna contact you. Don't worry. I'm really into the project and I appreciate the help. Providing you with the results is the least I can do.
Done survey. If you need anyone else to do follow-up one, just pm me and I'll help.
Quite interested to see results for this.
:)
<3 .x. .x. .x. .x. .x. .x. <3
One day you'll love me, the way I loved you. One day you'll think of me the way I thought of you. One day you'll cry for me, the way I cried for you. One day you'll want me, but I won't want you.
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!"
Thomas Parke D’Invilliers
Done :) this does seem really interesting, very different to other surveys I have done. I would also be happy to take part in the follow up as well, if you need any more people.
We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken
did the survey. would be happy to do the follow up if you need. also would like to see the results...
I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. How you hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside. ~ Girl Interrupted
I hurt myself before others get the chance...
I hurt myself because others hurt me and I can't stand the pain...
To tell the truth, I'm afraid of recovery because it means I have to let go...
I assume you are not from the UK. Basically, any and all research involving humans must undergo ethical approval. So they discuss possible pitfalls and then decide whether or not to grant you that approval. They are there to ensure that the research in conducting in a safe and professional manner and that the participants are fully aware of what they are doing and giving their informed consent. When it comes to children (anyone under 18) or 'vulnerable adults', there is another dimension that tries to ensure their safety because of issues of informed consent and legality.
Research usually comes with a consent form (online it might just be a tick box or a click to the next page) and an information sheet telling the participant what the project is, what it's purpose is, what you hope to achieve, whether data will be confidential or not, possible risks to the participant, that participation is voluntary (and what you will do with the data if they withdraw), and how the participant can contact you if they have questions, or who to contact if they have a query about you (usually a supervisor or department head).
Basically, ethics are annoying but essential in covering your own back as well as that of the participants.
This largely applies in the US as well, minus the 'vulnerable adults' part -- unless a court rules someone is unable to care for themselves in various ways, in which case they'd need their legal guardian to sign for them just like if they were a minor, it's just parental consent for minors and participant consent for people over 18.
Depending on the study, there might also be a requirement to provide appropriate follow-up care, usually in the form of a debriefing (i.e. telling the participants what the study was about), and/or providing referrals to appropriate organizations that can provide support to participants after completing the study. A survey on self-injury would definitely need to have support referrals at the end, since it almost certainly would include questions that could potentially be distressing to participants. A debriefing type thing at the end tends to be more relevant for studies were some form of deception is involved, which are more often laboratory-based procedures rather than surveys (for example, if you're looking at the effects of alcohol expectancies on behavior, you might have a study in which people are either told they are receiving alcohol or not receiving alcohol, and then half in each group actually get alcohol and half do not, so after the study you'd have to tell people, among other things, whether or not they were actually given alcohol).
Emily
(\__/)
(O.o )
(> < ) This Is Bunny. Copy Bunny into your signature to help him on his way to world domination.
Oh, thank you for the comprehensive response. I'm from Poland and as far as I know nobody requires such consent here. I did a survey for my B.A. thesis and none of my teachers mentioned it.
Wow. In the US, we definitely have to have informed consent even for an undergrad thesis. My thesis involves an online survey completed by high school students, and my advisor had to get written consent from the parents for them to participate, as well as assent (informal consent) from the kids whose parents gave permission before they could take the survey. Even when I write a paper for class that just includes the intro and methods sections of a study as an exercise, and I'm not actually going to do the study, I still have to include in the procedures that it was approved by the appropriate ethics board (which I have to identify by name, not just that it was approved by whoever it needed to be), and what sort of debriefing I would have done at the end of the study, even when I'm allowed to take all sorts of liberties with assuming I could get an unrealistic number of participants and such (I think for one of these papers I had a sample of 1000 selectively mute kids or something ridiculous like that... in reality I'd be lucky to get 5 or 6 kids for that). Although I suppose even here it depends on the the context, cause when I was in high school the school counselor did a survey that asked about drug and alcohol use and self harm (and I think some other things as well -- it was a long time ago), to gather data for himself, the administration, and the students (importantly, not for scientific research or publication), and he didn't get any sort of consent from our parents, he just sent out a link to the survey and we filled it out if we wanted to, even though most of us were still under 18.
I think though that if you want to publish your study in any of the major international journals (and while I haven't taken the survey yet, I think your topic is both interesting enough and sufficiently unstudied to more than justify publication assuming it's done properly!), you'll need to meet ethical requirements like the ones The One Who and I described. My instinct is that you probably wouldn't need to worry about the country-specific stuff either of us mentioned (e.g. 'vulnerable adults' or post-survey debriefing/referrals), but that things like informed consent and some form of institutional oversight (in the US, you'd need approval by a human subjects research committee at your institution and any institutions where you were recruiting participants, and I think the UK has something similar although I'm not sure) that are standard in multiple countries (and particularly the countries that produce the major journals in the field, so the US and the UK would be the biggest) are likely to be required wherever you are if you want to publish your findings. I could be totally wrong though -- I haven't actually published a paper yet (or, well, technically I have, but I was second to last author, I wasn't involved in the publication process at all, and we were working with bacteria), so I could well be wrong about how much of the ethics stuff is required by the journals versus the government and/or research institutions where the study is taking place, but my understanding is that most journals won't accept anything that doesn't have the appropriate ethics procedures.
And I meant what I said about it being publishable. You should definitely talk to your advisor about it. And as soon as I actually take the survey (which I'm going to do as soon as I finish writing this), I'll have a better idea of what you covered and what (if any) consent procedures you have, but imao I think that even if your survey isn't up to publication standards yet it would be worth redoing it for publication, and if what you have now isn't publishable yet, I think you should try to work with your advisor to get it there (and if you want to, and he/she won't or can't help you with it, I'd be happy to at least try to help you with it if you want -- I haven't published anything yet, but my advisor has said my thesis may well be publishable, so hopefully I'll be getting some experience with the publication process soon, and either way I know several people who have decades of experiences with publishing papers and would almost certainly be willing to help).
Last edited by ~invisible~girl~ : 17-11-2010 at 08:21 AM.
Reason: correcting the typo I noticed, probably ignoring dozens more I didn't :)
Emily
(\__/)
(O.o )
(> < ) This Is Bunny. Copy Bunny into your signature to help him on his way to world domination.
First, you have nothing to prevent people taking the survey multiple times. If you want to produce publishable results, you'll need to. I don't know how to do that, but I know it's possible, and if you want to look into it, my thesis advisor uses online surveys all the time and I could ask her about it, and I'm sure there are plenty of people on here who could come up with technological ways solutions using IP address or such.
Second, your explanation at the top totally explains what you're doing, and publications aside it's fabulous, but if you want to publish your data no journal is going to accept that. If you're interested, I can talk with you about what you'd need to have for it to be publishable (my school is very much geared towards academia, so they kind of drill this stuff into us for years).
Third, more of a minor grammar issue than anything else, but in questions 6 and 8 I'd change "does not apply" to "never," and in question 11 I'd add "none of the above" just before "does not apply" ("does not apply" covers people who report that they have no internal conversations or monologs, but there could also be people who do have internal conversations or monologs some of the time but not immediately before, during, or after self-injuring).
And finally, if you don't want to try to publish it yourself (if you just want to finish your masters thesis or whatever), any chance you'd want to send me what you end up with when you're done and let me clean up the methods and such and try to publish it as coauthors or something (I suck at writing intro and discussion sections, but I'm pretty dang good at the technical and mathematical parts -- designing measures and running statistics -- it's just the actually writing parts I have trouble with), cause I've been reviewing the literature on self-injury for a class assignment, and this is completely different to anything I've seen, and while I don't know enough about intrapersonal communication to say anything about that side of the research, this certainly seems to me to be a very interesting and worthwhile research question that I think could really add to the existing literature...
Emily
(\__/)
(O.o )
(> < ) This Is Bunny. Copy Bunny into your signature to help him on his way to world domination.
