BrunoUTAS
Greenlighter
- Joined
- Feb 20, 2012
- Messages
- 10
Hello!
Our names are Raimondo Bruno, Brianna Doyle, Shahni Watts and Stephen Bright – we are from the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Tasmania and Edith Cowan University. This project is part of Brianna’s honours degree.
We’re trying to make a scale (a questionnaire) for rating drugs. Specifically, one that might be useful for community reports of good, bad and unusual experiences.
We started this process last year. A group of us, including academics and people with living experience, looked at all of the existing scales in the scientific literature to rate positives and negatives of drug effects. We tried to boil this down to the smallest number of questions. Then we took that out to people who use drugs internationally to ask what questions were important to them. The general consensus was that there are a lot of different aspects of drugs that are important, so there needed to be lots of questions to cover this. (The study and results thread are on bluelight here)
Even in countries where drug checking exists, there are many areas without access – and an early warning system using community reports is a good way for people to help each other to stay safe. We know that if we want to offer a framework for reporting experiences it needs to be as short as possible but also cover all the things that people care about.
So, in the last few months, we did a lot of data crunching of the results of the first survey. We took that to groups of people that use drugs locally and they were great in blowing lots of our ideas up and made a much better set of questions.
So, now we’re back for a final round! We want to make sure that we haven’t missed anything that is really important to you when thinking about substances, and also try to work out where we can make the questionnaire shorter and easier.
PARTICIPATION REQUIREMENTS
18 or older, and
Used at least three different illicit substances in the past six months (not including cannabis)
Participation is completely online and open worldwide
Our survey should take about 10-15 minutes to complete. If you contributed your thoughts last time, it is absolutely OK to take part again!
The survey lets you try out all the questions that remain after this process to rate your best and worst recent drug experience, and lets you tell us how you would change the questions so that they cover everything that's important and nothing that isn't.
As a way of ‘giving back’, we will donate $500 AUD to one charity (which you can vote for) at the conclusion of the study (one for the whole study, unfortunately, not one for every participant!). We've put together a list of charities that you can vote for that includes drug harm reduction services as well as humanitarian and environmental causes. Last time around, Bluelight was the winning organisation!
If you need to contact us, you can do so by emailing [email protected] This study has been approved by the University of Tasmania Human Research Ethics Committee (Project #H31686).
You can find out more (and take part) in the study here!
Our names are Raimondo Bruno, Brianna Doyle, Shahni Watts and Stephen Bright – we are from the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Tasmania and Edith Cowan University. This project is part of Brianna’s honours degree.
We’re trying to make a scale (a questionnaire) for rating drugs. Specifically, one that might be useful for community reports of good, bad and unusual experiences.
We started this process last year. A group of us, including academics and people with living experience, looked at all of the existing scales in the scientific literature to rate positives and negatives of drug effects. We tried to boil this down to the smallest number of questions. Then we took that out to people who use drugs internationally to ask what questions were important to them. The general consensus was that there are a lot of different aspects of drugs that are important, so there needed to be lots of questions to cover this. (The study and results thread are on bluelight here)
Even in countries where drug checking exists, there are many areas without access – and an early warning system using community reports is a good way for people to help each other to stay safe. We know that if we want to offer a framework for reporting experiences it needs to be as short as possible but also cover all the things that people care about.
So, in the last few months, we did a lot of data crunching of the results of the first survey. We took that to groups of people that use drugs locally and they were great in blowing lots of our ideas up and made a much better set of questions.
So, now we’re back for a final round! We want to make sure that we haven’t missed anything that is really important to you when thinking about substances, and also try to work out where we can make the questionnaire shorter and easier.
PARTICIPATION REQUIREMENTS
18 or older, and
Used at least three different illicit substances in the past six months (not including cannabis)
Participation is completely online and open worldwide
Our survey should take about 10-15 minutes to complete. If you contributed your thoughts last time, it is absolutely OK to take part again!
The survey lets you try out all the questions that remain after this process to rate your best and worst recent drug experience, and lets you tell us how you would change the questions so that they cover everything that's important and nothing that isn't.
As a way of ‘giving back’, we will donate $500 AUD to one charity (which you can vote for) at the conclusion of the study (one for the whole study, unfortunately, not one for every participant!). We've put together a list of charities that you can vote for that includes drug harm reduction services as well as humanitarian and environmental causes. Last time around, Bluelight was the winning organisation!
If you need to contact us, you can do so by emailing [email protected] This study has been approved by the University of Tasmania Human Research Ethics Committee (Project #H31686).
You can find out more (and take part) in the study here!
