Recruiting for Study on Mood and Smartphone Data

Hello,
I’m a member of the Boston quantified self group and a doctoral student in my final year of a clinical psychology program. I’m currently recruiting participants for a large, IRB approved research study on using patterns in passive smartphone data to detect and track mood fluctuation, with multiple incentives for participants (see below) This is a project I have been planning for the past two years which I am funding at my own expense, motivated by my enthusiasm for this research. I would be deeply grateful to anyone willing to participate or help with sharing this opportunity. Thanks for your time.
[align=right]Sincerely, [/align]
[align=right] Ryan Hagen
Research Coordinator
Ryan_Hagen@MSPP.edu
978-273-8475[/align]
RESEARCH INFO:

PARTICIPANTS NEEDED FOR RESEARCH ON THE ASSESSMENT OF MOOD USING SMARTPHONE DATA

 Are you 18 years or older?
 Do you own an Android smartphone?

We are looking for volunteers to take part in an important study exploring the potential for assessing an individual’s mood based on patterns in smartphone data regarding typical communication and movement behaviors

As a participant in this study, you would be asked to:

 1)Install an application on your smartphone which will collect general data regarding the way you use your phone***. 

 2)Fill out a daily survey regarding your mood during the past 24 hours, which can be completed in 30 seconds.

This study will run for a period of 90 days

In appreciation for your time:
-you will be entered into a monthly raffle for three cash prizes of $100
-you will receive a file containing all the phone and mood data collected during the study
-you will receive a copy of the results of the study

TO PARTICIPATE in this study, please visit:
http://ginger.io/join/moodstudy/

For more information regarding the study, our credentials, privacy, or data protection please contact:

Ryan Hagen M.A.
Email: Ryan_Hagen@MSPP.edu
Phone: 978-273-8475

This study has been reviewed and approved for use by the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology’s Institutional Review Board (MSPP IRB). If you have questions or concerns regarding your rights as a participant in this survey, you may contact the IRB chair, Dr. Edward De Vos, edward_devos@mspp.edu , or at 617-327-6777. You may also report your concerns or complaints via email to IRB@mspp.edu .

*** This includes data such as the amount of time you spend using your phone for communication and your location and speed of movement while you use your mobile device. Privacy and data protection is our first priority. We do not access or collect the content of your mobile phone or text use, such as conversations or messages. For more info on the data we collect and how we protect it, please send an email to the address listed above.

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There’s no reason to crosspost your message to 5 different subforums.

[quote]I’m a member of the Boston quantified self group and a doctoral student in my final year of a clinical psychology program. I’m currently recruiting participants for a large, IRB approved research study on using patterns in passive smartphone data to detect and track mood fluctuation, with multiple incentives for participants (see below) This is a project I have been planning for the past two years which I am funding at my own expense, motivated by my enthusiasm for this research. [/quote]If you are looking to recruit QS people thinking mainly speaking about yourself might be no good idea.

Do I care whether your project is IRB approved? Do I even know what IRB stands for?

On the other hand, what do I care about as QS person?
What specific data does the app produce? What happens with the app after the 90 days are over? Since your primary stated purpose is research, will you release the code as open source?
Will I have access to the mood scores that I put into the app during the 90 days?

[quote]-you will receive a file containing all the phone and mood data collected during the study […] Privacy and data protection is our first priority.[/quote]Those are two very different claims. Which of those is true?

Christian,
Thanks for your feedback. To answer your last question, both statements are true; privacy is protected, and at the end of the study you will receive a copy all of YOUR phone and mood data, not the other particupants. Sorry if that was unclear. The type of data you will receive relates to all calls made and texts sent and general mobility. This includes:
Number of calls made/recieved/missed/returned
Call duration
Number of different people contacted in a day
number of texts sent/received
Characters per text
Distance/radius of daily travel

There is much more info I can provide people with regarding the goals/methods of the project, privacy policy, software specs etc if you contact me at Ryan_Hagen@MSPP.edu.

[quote]To answer your last question, both statements are true; privacy is protected, and at the end of the study you will receive a copy all of YOUR phone and mood data, not the other particupants. Sorry if that was unclear. [/quote]“All data” is actually pretty clear claim. Studies like the Butter/Cognition Experiment on genomera.com did publish all data. openSNP also publishes all data. If you don’t planning on publishing all data claiming to do so is a false claim.

[quote]There is much more info I can provide people with regarding the goals/methods of the project, privacy policy, software specs etc if you contact me at Ryan_Hagen@MSPP.edu.[/quote]Saying I want people from this forum to help me, but I don’t like to communicate on the forum is a bit strange.

Im not sure what you mean by publish the data. I’ll be submitting to psychology journals but I will be writing the results, not providing access to the actual data. Individual users will receive a spreadsheet of their own data.
Your interpretation that “I don’t like to communicate on the forum” is incorrect. I have over 120 pages of documentation regarding this project and I wanted to let people know that I am happy to send more detailed info than there is space to fit in a post.
I apologize for my multiple postings. I am not a frequent forum user and I wasn’t sure which one would be best to reach an audience.
I genuinely appreciate any feedback/criticism you have to offer, but I would also appreciate if you delivered it in a less hostile tone. Im a student and I’m still learning about all aspects of this research project. Thanks for your patience.

As a QS person, if make a decision to use a particular technology for tracking I need confidence that the technology still works in a year.
I think the same is true for every QS person who frequents this forum.

If you start a new way to track your mood on a daily basis you don’t want it that way of tracking to stop working once 90 days are over.
I could sent you a email, but most QS people who would think about participating in your experiment for the purpose of gathering their own data will care about whether the tool you want to provide outlives your study.

[quote]Im not sure what you mean by publish the data. I’ll be submitting to psychology journals but I will be writing the results, not providing access to the actual data. [/quote]There something called the Open Science movement. For the sake of science it’s good to have as much data as possible in the public domain to allow a variety of people to look at the data.

Mnemosyne would be an example of a software that some QS people use. It gathers an enormous amount of raw data and everyone can download a data dump that worth a few GB via a torrent. It’s an open science project.

In academic psychology the standard is to pay participants to participate in your experiement. Than you keep the resulting data for yourself and publish a paper on what you found.

For privacies sake it’s not a good idea to publish all data. If you do a scientific project you have to make a tradeoff. What do you value more?
In practice that can mean anonymising data sets. A data set that contains specific location data is not anonymised in a meaningful way.

I’m not saying that you have to practice open science. I however do think, that it’s not good to let people claim they practice open science and not practicing it.
Pretending that there’s no such thing as open science also feels offensive.

A project like Mnemosyne gather an amount of data that would cost millions if you would pay people. If you look at the homepage ( http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/ ) you don’t see: “Hey, I’m IRB approved and I need participants and I have set up clever incentives for them.” You rather see an explanation of the value of the project to the user and to scientific process as a whole.

In addition to pointing out the inconsitancy regarding the sharing of data, I asked four questions that resemble concerns for QS people and you decided to answer one of them. I don’t see why I should need to email you to get answers to the other three.

If my attempt of getting an answer to the other three question wasn’t intented to be a personal attack or be mainly hostile.

The software we are using for the study was created by Ginger.io, a company started a couple years ago by MIT graduates under the guidance of Alex Pentland. The app/service is usually marketed to large institutions like hospitals and large clinics, but they have agreed to allow me to use the app (and their services) for the purposes of my study. Technically, the app will continue to function if not uninstalled at the end of the 90 days, but the user will no longer have access to most of the data it collects.
In terms of academic psychology “paying” participants, that is practiced in some cases but is by no means the “standard”, though that may be affected by the size of the school and scope of the study. In my case, I attend a very small school that focuses on clinical practice and has no funding for research. For that reason, I am paying out of my own pocket to come up with the $300 in raffle money, and while I am working under the supervision of a committee, I am performing all aspects of the research process on my own.
I like the idea of putting the data into the public domain, but I would need to look into this further before making that decision. I have already enrolled 35 participants, so I suspect it may be too late to make this decision.
I believe I have answered all your questions, but feel free to let me know if I missed anything, or if you have any more.

[quote]I believe I have answered all your questions, but feel free to let me know if I missed anything, or if you have any more.
[/quote]Thank you. I’m sorry if my initial responses were a bit to harsh.

[/quote]Thank you. I’m sorry if my initial responses were a bit to harsh.
[/quote]

No worries, but thanks for the sentiment. You made some good points and your feedback was helpful. -Ryan