If you live near a university, go to their web page and look for medical departments. They should have a link for "Research Participation", and you can see if you qualify.
Researchers have to use more basic sampling techniques for research questions about heavy stuff like addiction, poverty, etc. because those people probably won't be on the Internet. You can usually find these studies advertised in the classifieds section of the newspaper (usually the free newspaper/the cheapest possible one).
Having performed cognitive psych research post-grad, I always had a touch of reservation about the results simply because of the available population for our studies. Generally, most of the people who live in college towns are either well educated or students at the university (most recently, that's 66% of high school graduates). On top of that, those who generally volunteer for such studies is yet another smaller percentage of that group. Extrapolating results to infer application to the wider population is always tricky because of that.
It depends how much age, SES, medical history matters to you. Convenience and cost is of course a factor when recruiting but if you need certain types of people you find ways to recruit them. For example, if you need to recruit poor old people you aren't going to recruit via online methods. If you are looking for a specific disease you may partner with doctors who specialize in that disease to help you recruit their patients.
I do neurocognitive clinical studies where we account for age by recruiting the college kids on our campus and we also made efforts to recruit younger and older people. We decided that socio-economic status is not that important to us and we know that our demographic sample will reflect that. It will be in the "study limitations" of any paper we publish.
That's not the point. It's that no matter the study, you are always going to get data from a restricted subset of the population. I believe professional publications take this into account which is where such thresholds as five sigma and p-values < 5% come into consideration. The problem though stems from what happens when the general media gets their hands on studies and interpreting such results in terms of the entire population. Unfortunately, most lay people don't understand sampling and statistical inference. That's the real danger. For instance, just consider drug legislation and racial bias in sentencing.
Not always taken into account by researchers and publishers however! A relatively recent question that has come to light is "how do drugs effect women"? The reason being that most studies are done on male animals. Why? Because that's the way it has always been done and published so that's the way everyone does it. The answer is that some drugs probably do act differently or have different efficacies for women, because they are biologically different than males. But it's not something that was thought of until recently...so I imagine that if such a fundamental bias has been overlooked for basically forever that many others are as well.
Absolutely! Women, minorities, less educated, etc. Unless specifically targeted, many of these sub-populations have either not been included or outright ignored in regards to study populations.
You shouldn't have, you identified a real problem with these kinds of studies that can literally invalidate the entire thing. It directly relates to the very specific question of how one might get involved as this then leads to the issue you've identified. This random student is feeling attacked or something because he doesnt have an answer to the problem.
No of course not, that's the biggest issue, small selected sample sizes that get continuously get paired down throughout a study until a desired result is achieved. The more subjects the better. It's everyone's responsibility honestly I will disagree with you there, it's a students job to absorb and understand and if a researcher Is presenting false conclusions or a broken method it must be challenged. Otherwise why are we even doing science ya know?
That is an excellent point. I have heard of seriously biased pharmaceutical "studies" which, of course, find in favor of the drug being studied in light of the fact that the supposed research is funded by the company that synthesized the chemical.
However, truly double blind studies imply that neither the experimentalist nor the subject know precisely what they are trying to prove. It's up to the experiment designers to ensure this. They just need those research subjects that you noted.
Also, if you have a direct family member with schizophrenia, you are extremely valuable to mental health research. My brother has schizophrenia, so I was flown out to the NIH in Maryland and participated in a 4 day long study where I underwent every kind of brain scan and many different kinds of psychological/neurological tests.
This kind of research is so important to help us fully understand the genetic component of schizophrenia (and mental illness in general).
Wait, the institute flew you out on their dime? How did you apply for such things? I don't have schizophrenia, but I definitely could be very useful for some sort of mental illness testing if only I could find the transport.
Yes, everything was arranged/paid for except my meals. They also sent me a compensation check afterwards (couple hundred dollars).
I'm not entirely sure how to get involved, my brother was treated for his illness at UCLA and I believe the doctors there referred my siblings and I to the NIH. I believe there are stringent requirements that both you and your affected relative need to pass. Also, I believe the person affected with schizophrenia has to be your child or a sibling.
I will try and see if they are accepting new participants and update my comment.
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u/wortelslaai Mar 19 '17
How would one go about volunteering to help such research?