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Study on depression

10 Post author: Swimmer963 15 January 2013 09:58PM

I am currently running a study on depression, in collaboration with Shannon Friedman (http://lesswrong.com/user/ShannonFriedman/overview/). If you are interested in participating, the study involves filling out a survey and will take a few minutes of your time (half an hour would be very generous), most likely once a week for four weeks. Send me an email at mdixo100@uottawa.ca, and I can give you more details. 

 

Thank you!

Comments (14)

Comment author: ChristianKl 16 January 2013 12:26:40AM 12 points [-]

Who do you want as participants? Everyone? Only people who think they are depressed? Only people with clinically diagnosed depression?

Comment author: Swimmer963 16 January 2013 02:59:22AM 1 point [-]

Everyone.

Comment author: shminux 15 January 2013 10:24:26PM 4 points [-]

Presumably this is a proper research study for your degree, not a personal effort?

Comment author: Swimmer963 15 January 2013 10:53:51PM 4 points [-]

Nope. Personal effort. I'm doing it as a favour to Shannon Friedman, because she was speculating in some comments that it'd be nice to have some data on her ideas, and I thought "cool, I could do that."

Comment author: FiftyTwo 16 January 2013 01:28:57AM 2 points [-]

Are you looking for test subjects or researchers? It would help if you gave more detail of what you want from people in the description (unless something in the nature of the experiment makes that unwise).

Comment author: Swimmer963 16 January 2013 02:59:15AM 1 point [-]

Test subjects. And I didn't want to say more because I don't want to "contaminate" the results. It involves filling out a survey though.

Comment author: [deleted] 17 January 2013 01:51:15PM 0 points [-]

If people announced that they had emailed you in this thread, would that be good or bad? I can see short arguments for both.

Good: Might encourage participation? Bad: Might bias results?

Comment author: Swimmer963 17 January 2013 01:54:18PM 0 points [-]

Overall, I would say bad. I don't think it would be a huge effect, though.

Comment author: pleeppleep 15 January 2013 11:12:04PM *  0 points [-]

This seems interesting. Are you just doing the whole thing through email? Also, voluntary response isn't a great way to get accurate results, but I guess it's all you have to work with.

Comment author: Swimmer963 16 January 2013 03:01:22AM 4 points [-]

It's going to be a survey to fill out online once a week. And I know we won't get the best quality data, necessarily, but I think this is the first study that's ever been done on this, AND I don't have a research background, so if the results come back super interesting, Shannon Friedman might try to recruit some people who do have a research background and are interested in doing it more rigorously.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 16 January 2013 01:30:08AM 2 points [-]

Also, the subset of people who participate on lw is going to be an incredibly unrepresentative sample,

Comment author: Swimmer963 16 January 2013 03:02:21AM 2 points [-]

I'm likely going to run the same experiment with a group recruited through a different medium–just trying to decide which one would be the most "random"/"representative of the general population", but also within my means.

Comment author: erratio 16 January 2013 04:40:20PM 3 points [-]

flyers around your university? Still not really representative but it would get you the standard WEIRD group

Comment author: Swimmer963 16 January 2013 05:18:24PM 0 points [-]

Would likely have to jump through the hoops of the university ethics board... Might be worthwhile though.