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Acceptability of Peer Support - ISTSS

Information about the study

What is this study about and why was I contacted?

• We are researchers from Summa Health and the University of Michigan working on a research project in order to understand the acceptability and perceptions of the use of peer support interventions in mental healthcare. This project involves you filling out a very brief electronic survey about your experiences and attitudes about peer support services. At the conclusion of the survey, there are several questions about your demographic characteristics, such as your age, gender, and ethnicity. You can choose to skip any questions that you don’t want to answer.
 
• You are eligible for this study if you can read and understand English, are at least 18 years of age, and currently work with clients/patients in a mental health setting.
 
• You are being invited to participate because you have provided your email address to a mental health organization listserv, or because you have accessed this study from a webpage or Facebook page related to national mental health organization. We have also asked several national mental health clinician organizations to send a recruitment email on our behalf. We are recruiting on the internet because we wanted to include as many people as possible, and the internet is an efficient means of recruiting participants from multiple geographic locations. Also, this type of recruitment allows you to remain completely anonymous.
 
• It will take no longer than approximately 10 minutes to complete this survey – your time is valuable and so we have kept the questionnaire as short as possible to make it easier for you to complete the survey.

Why should I participate and how will you protect my privacy?

• The benefits of participating include helping us study the attitudes and beliefs about peer support interventions, a topic that has not received much attention in the scientific literature. We hope to publish an article summarizing the overall results of this study, but no one person's answers will be presented -- only a summary of data across many participants.

• You will never be asked for your name or other unique identifying information, and your responses to the survey will be completely anonymous. No one will ever know that you participated in this study unless you tell them. All data will be kept in a password-protected computer, and only the investigators (Stacey L. Bradbury, Ph.D., and Alan K. Davis, Ph.D.) will have access to the data.
 
• To further protect your privacy, you may want to clear your internet browser and page history.
 
• Deciding to participate or not will have no impact on any relationship you may have with Summa Health or the University of Michigan.

Are there any risks to participating in this study?

• There are no obvious physical or psychological risks associated with participating in a survey asking your professional views regarding peer support specialists and interventions. Furthermore, please note that you are free to decide NOT to participate; that you are free to change your mind and stop participating at any time even if you begin the survey; and that you are free to skip any questions you don't want to answer.
 
How can I find out about the results from the study?

• To keep your survey completely anonymous we will not ask you to provide any contact information, however we will send a summary of the results from the study to the administrators which sent out our recruitment email and ask that they disseminate the summary to all members. We will also post a summary of our results to the listservs from which we directly recruited participants.


Please note that by clicking on the NEXT button below, you are agreeing to participate in this study. If you do not want to participate, just close your browser at any time.

If you have any questions about the study, you may contact the primary investigator, Stacey L. Bradbury in the Psychiatry Department at Summa Health at 330-379-9252 or bradburys@summahealth.org.
 
If you have any questions about your rights as a research subject you may call the Summa Health System Institutional Review Board (IRB) at 330-375-4045. The IRB is a group of people who assure that appropriate steps are taken to protect the rights and welfare of humans participating as subjects in a research study.