Recruiting Cannabis and employment

[sera20]

Hello,

My name is Sally Rooke, and I’m a researcher at UNSW. Some colleagues and I plan to develop a web-based program that assists people who would like to quit/reduce their cannabis use, and who also find that using cannabis is interfering with their work or preventing them from getting or keeping work. The website would contain a cannabis treatment program as well as several modules that help cannabis users in the context of employment.

Before we develop the program, we would like to get opinions from people who use cannabis at least once a week about how helpful this website might be and what kind of features they would like to see included. If you are able to assist personally with your opinion or know of someone who can, a five-minute survey can be accessed directly at
http://qeasttrial.co1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_eLKD8LHDUB9JcNf

Thanks!
Sally

 

[bit_pattern]

Not a terribly well designed survey - there's too many questions not relevant to criteria selected early on in the survey - i.e. you ask whether I'm a student then give a bunch of questions about my 'current job' or 'finding a job', there's not 'does not apply' option, but the rest of the survey is still relevant because I have worked in the previous ten years. Currently, I am stuck in the survey and can't progress without providing you false or misleading information.

Also, the final instrument with the sliding scale, it doesn't explain whether I think those utilities would be useful in general, or specifically useful to my case. I was left wondering why you were asking me how efficacious a web based service would be - I don't know, you guys are the researchers, you tell me what the literature says, I haven't done any research on how effective such things would be. If it is supposed to simply be what *I* would find most useful, that's another matter, but the wording of the question really doesn't make that clear.

 

[omnipresenthuman]

I think the main issue with the survey is that you're clearly skirting around the giant elephant in the room - that the main issue with cannabis and the workplace is simply that a large amount of work-sites and companies in the present day drug-test for cannabis, the primary recreational drug which actually stays around in your body for up to months at a time after previous use. Among those employers who use such drug-tests to screen for cannabis in their applicants, there is clearly a bias against users of cannabis as compared to users of opiates (such as heroin) or stimulants (such as cocaine), both types of substances which will exit the body, relatively, very rapidly.

Overall, I also think that, for actual users of cannabis, your survey might be seen as somewhat insulting, or at least as having been derived from a research body which doesn't seem to have much empirical knowledge about the substance at hand.

For one, the very concept of having specifically "cannabis treatment programs" seems like somewhat of a misnomer - you do realize cannabis is almost a 100% psychological addiction, correct? The human body has next to no physical addiction factually associated with cannabis - it can be withdrawn from, physically, with great ease.

More importantly, though, why would any current or former cannabis user make use of a website where they can record their progress in quitting cannabis? Research or no, you're just wasting peoples' time.

Better luck next time.