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!
Who do you want as participants? Everyone? Only people who think they are depressed? Only people with clinically diagnosed depression?
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Everyone.
Presumably this is a proper research study for your degree, not a personal effort?
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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."
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).
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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.
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?
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Overall, I would say bad. I don’t think it would be a huge effect, though.
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.
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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.
Also, the subset of people who participate on lw is going to be an incredibly unrepresentative sample,
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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.
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flyers around your university? Still not really representative but it would get you the standard WEIRD group
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Would likely have to jump through the hoops of the university ethics board… Might be worthwhile though.