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Research: mental health, minority stress and interpersonal difficulties


kelico

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The following is a survey/research request from Megan Berman, a third year psychology student from the university of East Anglia. If you would like to participate, you must be age 18+. You will find the link to the survey below.

 

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The study involves an anonymous online questionnaire and relates to mental health, minority stress and interpersonal difficulties. It has been approved by the university ethics committee and I will not be collecting any identifiable data nor any data from people under the age of 18.
 
The survey:

This study was approved by the Project Team.

On behalf of PT,

kelico

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I always dislike answering studies like this, because I know that I will have to answer about being depressed, but that they will likely link that to asexuality instead of literally everything else in life. They rarely have "are you happy with asexuality, but depressed about other things?"

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  • 2 weeks later...

@Zagadka... but Ukrainianwell, that is why it is important in survey studies to sample a large and representative portion of the population.  

One supposes that likelihood of being depressed because of "other things" will distribute evenly across the population regardless of sexuality.  

Suppose, for example , that a common source of depression was... oh, I don't know, maybe not eating enough watermelon.  One supposes that access to watermelon doesn't link to sexuality, so people of all sexualities would be equally likely to experience watermelon-dependent depression.  In fact, if people in one group, say, asexuals, were especially likely not to take this survey because of being more inclined to think, "really I am depressed because of watermelons but they are going to conclude I am depressed because of asexuality," then the research findings would wind up being incorrectly skewed in the wrong direction, because the researchers would observe watermelon-based depression in other groups but less so in the group of asexuals.  

For researchers, engaging in good sampling is hard. It is well known that people opt in and opt out of participating in studies for all kinds of reasons, and that those reasons do indeed influence the kind of data that can be collected, sometimes in predictable ways and sometimes in unpredictable ways.

 

I guess my main take-away is this.  No one should ever participate in a study that they are uncomfortable participating in, whatever their reason may be, but neither should one refrain from participating in a study because they don't think that their own personal data should be represented in the data set.  So long as one meets the criteria for a study as stipulated by the researchers, and so long as one is honest about their responses, then one is creating honest data.  

Of course, data can be and sometimes is mis-interpreted, but creating richer data sets makes that possibility less likely rather than more likely.

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