Is there a website that matches student surveys with willing survey fillers-in?

I'm lucky enough to have two academic email accounts at different universities and consequently I get a steady stream of all-users requests from students who ask us to fill in a survey or take part in an experiment etc. These are generally good-will-based although some involve a small payment for time / expense.

Clearly, despite faculty and student diversity, this is still going to a fairly defined 'university population' rather than the wider general public.

There are several ways of getting your survey (or requests for participants) under the eyeballs of more people and they'll have varying degrees of success. I've never tried to do this myself but my top-of-head suggestions might include the suggestions below, but here's my main question.

Is there a website / database to which students can add details of their survey, perhaps categorised by topic and type of help wanted?

It sounds like the sort of thing people like MySociety might build, or a few enterprising university-based nerds. Possibly JISC might help. Maybe not.

I'm thinking of something that would be available for any student at any UK university, so it would need some buy-in from all UK unis. It would - in my fantasy world - be promoted by all public engagement / outreach officers at events and on websites, and members of the public would be able to help out on a student's research project. Possibly people could sign up or get RSS feeds telling them when something to do with a particular topic becomes available. Where appropriate students could post results arising from their work and what this has added to our knowledge of a topic, or validity of a new method etc.

Aeons ago I signed up to Focus Force which lets people hear about focus groups happening for various things. That's a commercial venture but I'm sure something similar could be organised without great cost and it would seem to benefit an awful lot of people in universities.

UCL has a scheme in place for people who want to take part in its lab experiments, possibly other universities have other arrangements - it just seems odd that surveys especially (online, one's location is likely irrelevant unless the survey is about 'living in Bristol') can't get a wider audience.

Anyway here are my suggestions - it's entirely possible they're crap, as I say I don't run surveys and don't recruit anyone to them.

Facebook - ask your friends to do the survey, ask them to share it. You can even pay to promote it to a particular demographic if you wish. Obviously if it's just your friends then there's another risk of biased results.

Post your link more than once a few hours or day(s) apart but intersperse it with other things too. You can also tag a few people and ask them to help out but don't spam people.

Twitter - obviously. Great way to reach people. Best to spend a bit of time getting to know it first though. If you want to reach a particular target audience it's wise to spend some time searching, by keyword, for accounts that talk about what you're interested. See who they're following, see what hashtags they're using, get to know them. Twitter's more about building relationships than spamming people.

I recommend posting the link a few times at different times of day and on different times of day. Make sure you post other things in the interim otherwise your portfolio of tweets will look spammy and dull.

Hopefully other people will retweet your request, here are examples of where I've done that:

Ppl who like London, pedometers, kittens, smartphones &helping UCL students get data might also like the Fitbit study http://t.co/Xh8FSHShsM
— Jo Brodie (@JoBrodie) April 22, 2013

Got headphones? A kindly disposition? ~10-20min? Combine the 3 of them &help out an MSc student doing audio research :) http://t.co/eX0m9RMg
— Jo Brodie (@JoBrodie) January 11, 2012

Newsagents' windows / supermarket community boards - in among the ads offering a child's bike and three piece suite why not add your request.

Gumtree - do people ever use the site for that sort of thing? It seems to get used for everything else so sounds like it might be worth investigating but I've never used it.

Create a mini site - you can create a really nice free website on Wordpress or even here on Blogger and put up a bit of information about your research, how people can help by taking part and a link to your survey. You can add new bits of information about it but it might be a lot of work for very little return.

Here's an example though by a student at UCL http://www.dbpharrison.com/general/walkerbitrecruitment/

Diabetes and language used in healthcare and research

NB. Likely a few more links to be added in, I am working on a slightly uncooperative wifi network at the moment

I took part in a work-related Twitter chat last night, about avoiding errors in the self-management of diabetes.

The project I work on, CHI+MED, is looking at ways of making interactive medical devices safer but to do this we don't just study the devices themselves but also the people who use them and the systems that the machines are used in - basically it's a "sociotechnical" model sort of thing.

People know that they make errors in using machines. Sometimes the system helps them to prevent this, for example I've made good use of the delete key while typing this post, someone had the good sense to add one in to keyboard design. Sometimes people develop their own cunning plans to prevent errors. These are 'resilience strategies' (strategies that make them resilient to error) that are either generated by the person themselves or picked up from colleagues - they're rarely 'in the instruction manual' and they're not part of any official training.

But they can be really useful - both to other people who are using that medical device, but also to researchers who want to find out the strategies people employ to prevent mishaps.

And that's what the chat was about - what are the sorts of errors that people with diabetes (particularly Type 1 diabetes who are regularly monitoring their blood glucose levels and adjusting doses of injected insulin) might make and what tricks have they developed to try and avoid making an error.

One interesting things that came up was the language used by error researchers and how this might conflict with that used by people with diabetes or diabetes researchers. Dom (a colleague on CHI+MED who was co-hosting the Tweetchat with @OurDiabetes) uses terms like slip, mistake and violation which have precise meanings in the context of human factors and ergonomics research.

One of the people participating in the chat felt that the word violation was a bit of a strong term - it certainly carries negative connotations. Suzette Woodward has a helpful post explaining some of the examples of violations (eg of policies) in a healthcare setting: Working to rule?

Language used in different disciplines often has the potential to offend, or even just misfire, when heard by other people out of context.

I remember, when working in a GPs' surgery 10 years ago, reading that "the patient denied having any chest pains" and being amused at the implication that the doctor knew full well that the patient was having chest pains but that the patient wasn't having any of it. That's not what it means of course, it just seemed a strange way to say "the patient reported that he was not experiencing any chest pains" but "deny" carries other meanings to those not immersed in this use of language.

Similarly there are terms used in healthcare research looking at situations where medication is just not taken. It might be forgotten, lost (stolen?), unusable (damaged) and so not used. Equally it might be intentionally not used.

The various terms I came across that meant "not taking his or her medication" were non-compliance, non-adherence and non-concordance. All mean more or less the same thing but non-compliant sounds a bit more "naughty diabetic*" and "non-concordance" suggests a certain disagreement between patient and doctor.

*I do of course mean "naughty person with diabetes" ;-)

Further reading

• Errordiary learning zone / brain food - explains why Dom is collecting errors for research purposes
• Can resilience strategies help with diabetes management? - from Dom's own blog
• Can Errordiary be used to support patient safety education? - from Errordiary
• Unintentional non-adherence: can a spoon full of resilience help the medicine go down? (open access, full paper freely available) by Dominic Furniss, Nick Barber, Imogen Lyons, Lina Eliasson and Ann Blandford. Dom and Ann are both on the CHI+MED project (Ann is both the Principal Investigator (PI) at the UCL site and PI of the CHI+MED project overall). BMJ Qual Saf doi:10.1136/bmjqs-2013-002276

Healthcare professionals: research project / focus group on error, blame and resilience in London

Summary
There's a focus group next Thursday in London for healthcare professionals to talk about the issues of error, blame and their resilience strategies to avoid errors. An example might be using a post-it note to flag up a reminder.

By their very nature people's 'resilience strategies' aren't official or found in manuals - we're collecting this sort of 'hidden' information to use in improving the design of medical devices.

Making devices more resilient to error can make them safer for patients. 

Medical Professionals (e.g. nurses, doctors, paramedics and emergency care practitioners)
Thursday 26th September 2013
5.30-6.00pm – registration, food and refreshments
6.00-8.00pm – focus group

---

I work on the CHI+MED project which is about making interactive medical devices (such as cancer drug pumps and blood glucose meters for people with diabetes) safer and more resistant to error. One of the offshoots of the project is Errordiary* which collects examples of everday error and they're running a focus group next Thursday 26 September 2013 to find out about error, and its prevention, in healthcare.

In most situations we pretty much accept that everyone makes mistakes. If I turn up to the tube station and reach for my keys out instead of my rail card I've made a mistake. But no-one dies. There are no calls to retrain me and no-one's blaming me beyond some annoyed tuts from passengers behind me. The press is unlikely to scour my Facebook page for pictures of me drunk and incompetently trying to get through barriers with the wrong card, and I'm unlikely to lose my job.

We do tend to be a bit more blame-y towards people who work in healthcare when something goes wrong - these are highly trained individuals who are rarely 'permitted' to be human and make mistakes. When we ask for them to be sacked for incompetence we may be holding them to an impossible (unreasonably high) standard. When we ask for them to be retrained we may be wasting everyone's time if 'lack of training' had nothing to do with the fault in the first place.

No amount of training can really prevent me from grabbing the wrong thing but there are things that can be done to make it less likely.

Most people are right-handed so it's useful to have the control point on the right hand side (that's building resilience into the system) and it's sensible for me to keep my card in my right pocket. I can also keep my keys in my bag, so they're separate from my rail card!

On a chemotherapy pump it's easy enough to type in a wrong number: 52 instead of 5.2. Perhaps the visual display of the decimal point be clearer. Or the decimal point on the keypad could be in a better position. Perhaps the drug library installed on the pump could flag up that the drug dose is much higher than expected.

Hopefully the user will notice anyway and re-enter the correct figure - but what can be done to increase the chances that any error is spotted?

Finding out more about the errors that people make and how they avoid them, or recover from them, is a big part of tackling them and improving the safer use of devices.

Here's the blurb that I've pinched from my colleague Dom Furniss' post on the Errordiary focus group:

We are organising focus groups to find out more about what you think of human error, blame culture and resilience to error. We’re interested in mistakes – why we make them, how often we make them and what happens when we make them in trivial and serious contexts. For example:

• How often do you make errors? All the time, never or somewhere in between?
• What do you think about errors? Are they sometimes funny? What about when they happen at work?
• What do you think about fatal errors reported in the news? What do you think should happen to people after they’ve made a serious error?
• Should we share errors more? What are the pros and cons of this? What are the challenges?
• What can we do to prevent errors happening in the future?

If you're a healthcare professional and free next Thursday please help, or tell a friend - thank you :)

*Errordiary

"To err is human…
To understand why we err and to try to reduce our erring is human too!

Errordiary is about sharing errors so people can think about human error in a new way. We already know that the same psychological principles lie behind everyday errors and those errors of a more serious nature. Whether they are funny, frustrating or fatal depends on the context."
From About Errordiary

Wiseman, S., Gould, S., Furniss, D., & Cox, A. (2012). Errordiary: Support for teaching human error. Paper presented at the Contextualised Curriculum Workshop at CHI 2012, Austin, Texas, May 2012.

You can see the latest tweets, tagged with #Errordiary (about errors) or #rsdiary (resilience strategies diary) too.

Further reading - preprints available to download as PDFs from the links given
Furniss, D., Back, J., & Blandford, A. (2012). Cognitive resilience: Can we use Twitter to make strategies more tangible? Proceedings of European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (ECCE 2012), 96–99. New York: ACM.

Lee, P. T., Thompson, F., & Thimbleby, H. (2012). Analysis of infusion pump error logs and their significance for health care. British Journal of Nursing (Intravenous Supplement), 21(8), S12-S20.

Furniss, D., Blandford, A., & Mayer, A. (2011). Unremarkable errors: Low-level disturbances in infusion pump use. Proceedings of the 25th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction (HCI-2011), 197–204.