Last Updated: January 08, 2020
Purpose of Research
You are being asked to take part in a research project to better understand how we think in our daily lives. This document contains important information about this study and what to expect if you decide to participate. Please consider the information carefully. Feel free to ask questions before making your decision whether or not to participate. This research is conducted by the Neuroscience of Emotion and Thought (NET) Lab (“Net Lab,” “we,” “our,” or “us”) at the University of Arizona. You can reach us at [email protected].
Requirements of Participation
This study involves using the “Mind Window” app which is available from the Google Play and Apple App stores as a free download (however, data charges from your mobile service provider will still apply). Mind Window will be used to complete: basic questions about your demographic characteristics (age, gender, employment status, etc.); questions about your typical thoughts, personality, beliefs, and behaviors; and periodic ‘experience check-in’ questions about your current experience. Check-ins will occur at six, random times per day (within the time period that you specify) and will be brought to your attention by a notification, from the Mind Window app, on your mobile phone. You may choose to respond to a notification or you may ignore it if it is not reasonable for you to answer at that time (e.g., while driving). The basic questionnaires at the beginning of the app take roughly 10 minutes to complete, and responding to each app notification takes approximately 1 to 2 minutes. If desired, you may complete additional questionnaires to provide a more complete picture of your perspective and experiences.
Taking part in this study is completely voluntary. You will not be penalized in any way if you choose not to participate or to end your participation in the study. We ask that you provide complete and truthful responses, but we do not expect (or encourage) you to provide any personally identifying information (e.g., name, address, employer, SSN, etc.).
Please note that you must be at least 18 to participate in this study and be fluent in English. You must be willing to respond honestly to the questions we will ask. You must also agree not to use or respond to the app when it might pose a risk to your safety or the safety of others (e.g., while driving or operating heavy machinery).
Risks & Benefit of Participation
There is no anticipation that physical or mental harm will occur as a result of your participation in this research. However, as a result of participation, you may realize or pay more attention to your thought processes and the contents of your day-to-day thoughts. If you are not happy with this realization, it may cause some distress.
When information is gathered via on-line means, there is always a chance that a data breach will compromise the security of Personal Information. In order to address this potential issue, greater than industry-standard protocols have been implemented to minimize any risk to the security of collected data (as outlined completely in the Mind Window Privacy Policy).
There is no specific guarantee of benefit from the study, nor is there any financial compensation for participation. However, once you respond to 20 notifications, you will have the opportunity to view graphical displays of patterns in your general thought and how those patterns change over time. Additionally, by providing information in the ‘free-response’ section of the check-ins, you will be able to see a word cloud that represents frequent thoughts (as soon as there are sufficient words to generate this feature).
These statistics may help you understand patterns of thinking, but are for general information only – they are a ‘best guess’ about what you might be experiencing and based completely on the information provided during check-ins. Should important information be missing or inaccurate, these statistics will suffer in regard to their accuracy.
Independent of personal benefit, your participation helps to advance research in psychology and will help the scientific community better understand how adults think in daily life.
Confidentiality
Once you register with us and sign in to Mind Window, your Personal Information is stored as deidentified/anonymized information and is only connected with the username and password that you provided via a unique identification code. It is not possible for our research team to identify you via this identification code unless: you should provide identifying information as a part of your username; you are provided a username due to involvement in another study; or you contact us using a personally identifying address (e.g., email, physical) and disclose your username to us.
Use of Personal Information
Personal Information and other details about you that you supply as part of the registration process or that are collected by us, when you participate in this research, are used for the following general purposes:
- Conduct academic research based on your Personal Information combined with the Personal
Information of other users;
- Contact you (via global messages in the Mind Window app) about opportunities to participate in additional research studies or projects;
- Respond to your comments, questions and requests and provide customer service.
Sharing Personal Information
We may share aggregated or de-identified information for the purpose of research affiliated with the University. De-identified information is defined as information that cannot reasonably be used to identify you or be tracked back to your user account. This de-identified information may be made available as a publicly-available data set intended for research. Any publicly-available dataset created from this research will omit free-response information (e.g., notes that you may create in the Product). If the dataset is privately shared with other research teams, then free-response information will be stripped (e.g., “John” replaced with “JXXX”) of any identifying information that can be reasonably identified by our research staff and/or software algorithms employed for that purpose.
Editing & Removing your Personal Information
You can edit some portions of your Personal Information at any time. Some information (e.g., initial
demographic questions, responses to prompts) cannot be changed as it is not readily visible to you via the Mind Window app and such changes would result in a compromise of the integrity of research endeavors by the University. However, we will make our best efforts to correct any material error in your Personal Information that you make us aware of.
You may delete your account by emailing us at [email protected] where we will provide you with additional instructions to remove your access to the Product. If requested, your stored data may be removed from our databases and will not be included in any future research. We may, however, retain portions of your Personal Information for the purposes of maintaining a record of our communications with you, as well as to maintain the integrity of analyses that have been completed before the request for removal.
Contacting Us
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at [email protected].