Department of Education

 

                                                                                                                           

Dear Participant,

 

My name is Dr Dusana Dorjee and I am a cognitive neuroscientist in the Department of Education at the University of York. One of the research topics I investigate is about effects of contemplative practices on wellbeing and associated changes in the mind and brain. You have been invited to take part in the following research project. Before continuing, please read this information carefully:

 

What is the purpose of this study?

Measuring the effects of contemplative practices (such as mindfulness, meditation more broadly, or prayer) in an accurate and comprehensive way remains one of the main challenges of meditation research. The current study aims to validate a set of new measures attempting to assess changes in motivation, attention, emotion regulation, healthy qualities of mind (such as compassion) and modes of awareness/consciousness associated with contemplative practices. We hope that these new measures will support further comprehensive research on how contemplative practices shape the processes in the mind and brain linked to wellbeing.

 

What would this mean for you?

If you decide to participate in this study, you will be asked to complete online a set of new questionnaires about the types of contemplative practices you have been engaging in, your motivation for practicing and your attention, emotion regulation and states of awareness/consciousness within and outside of meditation. To relate the information from the new measures to established measures, you will also fill in a few questionnaires about your mental wellbeing. If you think that completing questions about mental health could be psychologically challenging for you, it might be best if you don’t participate in this study. Completing the questionnaires will take you approx. 40 minutes, all questions need to be completed in one session. All the data collected for this study will be anonymous.  We will not ask for your name, occupation or contact information. However, at the end of the online survey we will ask you if you would like to attend a free one-hour online workshop titled ‘How does meditation change your mind and brain?’ offered by Dr Dorjee. If you would like to attend, you will need to share with us your email address so that we can contact you about the workshop. Your email address will be collected and stored separately from the responses you provide in the survey and your data will remain anonymous.

 

Participation is voluntary

Participation in this study is entirely optional. If you do agree to complete the questionnaires you are free to leave any questions unanswered or to stop completing the questionnaire altogether at any point. You can withdraw from the study during data collection by closing your browser. Once the questionnaire is submitted the data cannot be withdrawn as it is anonymous at the point of submission so there will be no way to identify your data. 

 

Storing and using your data

The data will be stored in a password protected file.  The anonymous data may be used in presentations, online, in research reports, in project summaries or similar.  Your individual data will not be identifiable but if you do not want the data to be used in this way please do not complete the questionnaire. Since we are practising Open Science, anonymised data will be stored indefinitely with the University’s Research Data York service or in other open research data repositories. Participant email addresses will not be linked to the data and will be deleted after the online workshop.

 

Questions or concerns

This research has been approved by the Department of Education, University of York Ethics Committee.  If you have any questions or complaints about this research please contact Dr Dusana Dorjee  dusana.dorjee@york.ac.uk  or the Ethics Committee via education-research-admin@york.ac.uk. If you are still dissatisfied, please contact the University’s Data Protection Officer at dataprotection@york.ac.uk

Many thanks for your help with this research.

 

Please continue if you agree with the above information, and proceed by clicking on the ‘Next’ button.