ABOUT
THE STUDY
Stress Reduction Study is a research project led by Polina Beloborodova, Nabila Farhin Jahan, and Prof. Kirk Warren Brown at Virginia Commonwealth University. The study is funded by the Mind & Life Institute Francisco J. Varela Grant and approved by VCU Institutional Review Board and Information Security Office.
OUR GOAL
Studying can be a difficult time, and some students can find it challenging to deal with stress during college. Our research project aims to understand how two different online stress reduction programs affect students’ daily experiences, and you are invited to take part in the study.
WHAT TO EXPECT
After signing up, you will be randomly assigned to one of the training programs. For two weeks, you will receive daily online lessons that will teach you how to manage stress. To investigate how those programs affect students’ mood, we will monitor their daily activities and experiences combining brief daily surveys with activity tracking via smartphones.
WHY PARTICIPATE?
Learn stress management skills that will help you maintain emotional well-being throughout college and beyond.
Help us to understand what factors affect students’ emotional well-being and develop programs to prevent mental health problems, such as depression.
Compensation is available
YOUR COMMITMENT
In this study, in addition to participating in one of the training programs, you will be asked to do the following things:
Fill pre-training, post-training, and end-of-semester online questionnaires
Fill brief surveys (2-3 min) three times per day (morning, afternoon, evening) on you smartphone for five weeks
Install an app called AWARE on your smartphone and allow it to collect and transfer to a secure VCU server such data as calls and texts frequency (but not content), GPS location, battery, screen on/off, motion, and audio environment (without recording)
Tell us about your experience of participating in the training program in a recorded phone interview.
DATA SHARING AND SECURITY
We are aware that mental health and smartphone data are sensitive research data and we will take the necessary technical and organizational measures to ensure that they cannot be traced back to you. In the beginning, every participant gets a random ID code (pseudonym) which will be attached to the research data to minimize recognizability and traceability. From then on, we will only use the pseudonymized data (i.e. without your name, email and other identifiers) for research. Your de-identified questionnaires and daily surveys data, as well as aggregated smartphone data will be stored indefinitely by the study team and shared publicly in the Open Science Framework repository (https://osf.io) so that other researchers and society can maximally benefit from your efforts as a research participant.
INVESTIGATORS
KIRK WARREN BROWN
Research Adviser
POLINA BELOBORODOVA
Graduate Student
NABILA FARHIN JAHAN
Graduate Student
STUDY TEAM
