Currently, my research is going very well! Just recently we were approved to move on with our research by the IRB, but in order to get approval there were many things we needed. We needed a survey and a cover letter. The cover letter was in order to get consent from the participants, and to give prospective participants information on the survey. The cover letter states why this group of participants was chosen, risks of taking the survey (emotional responses to questions focused on trauma and childhood experiences,) and that if they chose to do the survey, they must answer all of the questions to get accurate data. If they proceeded, they were giving their consent. At the end of the consent letter my mentor and I's information was stated in case any participants had any questions about the information on the survey. The other piece that we needed to have in order to get IRB approval was the survey itself. Since our question was about how ACEs affect the individual and their mental health, we needed questions on the survey that would give us these desired answers. To get information on whether participants have had any ACEs, we had 4 questions asking about different ACEs, splitting up the questions by categories; different types of abuse, emotional or physical neglect, and unfit parents or caregivers. After those questions, we had 8 questions asking about participants' mental health using the Likert scale, (scale that goes from 1 to 7, 7 being highest.)
Then we had a question asking the participants if they think that their mental health has impacted relationships with professors, friends, coworkers, etc. The last question asks whether or not participants have been diagnosed with anxiety or depression. Since all of the survey questions were figured out, we were ready to add it to the IRB form and submit it! When our research was approved, we were ready to disseminate the survey. We decided the best way to do this was to send it through email, and to use SONA. First, we sent it to Social Work 100 classes. After, we had our survey set up in SONA, (a system used for students to get extra credit in a psychology courses if they fill out surveys.) As of right now there are 97 recorded responses and we will be leaving the form open May to find out how many responses in total we got!