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Hey everyone. I’m a psychology student doing my dissertation about ecstasy use and mood, I really need people to participate. All it is is a couple of questionnaires, its all explained below. If you want to take part just copy the lot into an email and send it to memyselfanddanny@hotmail.com, any help would be massively appreciated.
Thanks,
Danny
I would firstly like to thank you for taking part in the study, and to inform you that this research is subject to ethical guidelines that have been set out by the British Psychological Society. You have the right to withdraw from the study at any point, and your completing and returning the questionnaires will be taken as a sign that you give written consent for the data to be used in the research. A written report of the findings of the study will be carried out, and the report may also include presentation at academic conferences or articles in academic journals. However, your identity will remain anonymous throughout the whole process, and what little personal information is taken is simply for the purposes of matching the questionnaires together.
The study will consist of 2 questionnaires which you are required to fill in. The first is a Drugs History Questionnaire, which consists of 10 questions that you should answer as honestly as possible, and is to determine your level of drug use (If you do not use ecstasy then just leave out the ecstasy related questions and just do the other bits). The second is a Profile of Mood States Questionnaire consisting of 65 items, words which you should rate on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 4 (quite a bit), relating each to how you have felt over the past week. The only requirement when filling in the questionnaire is that you have not taken ecstasy within the past 4 days, as due to the nature of the study this would have a major effect on the outcome. The two questionnaires should take in total no more than about 20 minutes to complete.
If any of the issues raised by either of the questionnaires causes any distress, the following are 24 hour, confidential helplines that you can call:
Samaritans – 08457 909090
National Drugs Helpline – 0800 776600
Drugs History Questionnaire
1 Your Age:
2 Your Gender:
3 Your age when you first started using Ecstasy:
4 Do you currently consider yourself an Ecstasy user?
5 How many days has it been since you last used Ecstasy?
6 Roughly how many Ecstasy pills would you take in one session?
7 How often are the sessions when you use ecstasy? (eg. Daily, Monthly, Yearly etc)
8 How many times have you used Ecstasy in your lifetime? (This does not have to be an exact figure, but please try to be as accurate as possible)
9 Please list any other recreational drugs you have used in your lifetime, and the number of days since you last used each of them:
10 Do you use any of these on a regular basis? Please list those that you do.
11 Are you currently, or have you ever studied at University?
Mood States Questionnaire
Below is a list of words that describe feelings people have. Please read each one carefully. Then score it either 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 to describe how you have been feeling over the past 2 days.
The numbers refer to these phrases:
0 = Not at all
1 = A Little
2 = Moderately
3 = Quite a bit
4 = Extremely
Friendly
Tense
Angry
Worn out
Unhappy
Clear-headed
Lively
Confused
Sorry for things done
Shaky
Listless
Peeved
Considerate
Sad
Active
On edge
Grouchy
Blue
Energetic
Panicky
Hopeless
Relaxed
Unworthy
Spiteful
Sympathetic
Uneasy
Restless
Unable to concentrate
Fatigued
Helpful
Annoyed
Discouraged
Resentful
Nervous
Lonely
Miserable
Muddled
Cheerful
Bitter
Exhausted
Anxious
Ready to fight
Good natured
Gloomy
Desperate
Sluggish
Rebellious
Helpless
Weary
Bewildered
Alert
Deceived
Furious
Efficient
Trusting
Full of pep
Bad tempered
Worthless
Forgetful
Carefree
Terrified
Guilty
Vigorous
Uncertain about things
Bushed
Feedback on the questionnaires is incredibly helpful to me, so if you have any comments about them then please feel free to add them below:
Danny,
Its good to see people in academia studying the effects of drugs, but I would say that you have arrived on here and made your very first post as if this board is a milk-cow for students’ data-gatherings!
I’ve nothing against people using this board for their research – in fact I was worrying earlier that there aren’t enough university students on here 😉
but you have asked for a lot of info without giving much about yourself.
How do we know you are not an anti-drugs researcher, a tabloid journalist, even a cop?!
An e-mail can be quite personal these days as it contains loads of data in the header often leads to an account that can be traced to a home address or a workplace.
You are asking people to use email to send you details of an activity that can put them in jail. I’m not saying you would grass people up, but you are asking them to send this info in a risky and insecure manner. Cops worldwide can get easy access to hotmail accounts if they get in touch with the FBI.
another chap (Giani) did something similar, but he used a webserver that automatically anonymised the survey results – it may even have been on an encrypted server and all that would have been monitored is an IP address which is often shared between many different users nowadays. He is also a regular contributor to this board and is involved in a very good psy-trance event in London..
What University/College do you attend? (you did not use a normal academic IP address!) What level are you studying at and who is funding your course? There are plenty of cops and HM Revenue and Customs officers at uni these days….
Also, how did you find this board? Perhaps you also like dance music and raves; why not chat a bit about that as well? Maybe people will be more open then.
looks remakably like a survey made by someone who doesnt know shit about drugs, and has never done them themselves. i wouldnt fill that in if you paid me. both drugs numbers at the bottom relate to negative drug effects, which gives me an idea as to the bias you want in your research (dont give me that impartial shit, theres no such thing). not only that, almost all the options at the bottom for mood are negative, so in essence i would say quite calmly “fuck off you square”. i was having a nice day till i read that.
if you want to know about e, go get some, stick it down your neck and whack some tunes on. yes i did go to uni, you smug condescending prick.
there was a good piece of research being carried out by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation last year about non-problematic heroin use and the researchers used this site, among many others to reach people, with some success
from the questions in the survey it was clear that the researchers were well informed about their subject before trying to ask users about their experiences
don’t mean to be rude, but your ‘survey’ looks very poor
might want to think your dissertation, or at least do some decent research about your subject matter before asking strangers for information about their (illegal) habits (if you’ve already done this, it doesn’t come accross)
it will lend more weight to your ‘survey’ and people may trust your research methods a bit more and be willing to help… at the moment i have to say the content and the method (very hassley and unclear) look a bit GCSE-level, from where I’m sitting
its passing too much of the work on to the respondent – and in an extremely risky fashion. Did the BPS not teach you how to deal with sensitive subjects of this nature?
This isn’t just a survey on whether someone is happy or sad; you are asking someone to make statements relating to a potentially criminal activity using their e-mail address.
Under current UK/US law and Hotmail’s own contracts with the user; any cop reading this can quite easily go to their force computer crimes unit and pass on the hotmail email address you have posted for collecting the survey results
They can then contact the FBI; and although they may not be able to get the survey answers without jumping through a few more legal hoops; they can still get a nice list of e-mail addresses used by people who may take class A drugs, or their associates.
These can then be investigated. Even a “disposable” address can be traced back to date, time,location.
OK it may return just a handful of small time users, but may also help the cops to track other info about drug use and raves; and by the cops busting or even giving a warning to just a couple of these people it helps stifle attempts at free speech or discussion about our culture; and you will have helped achieve this.
TBH if you are prepared to pass such a risk on to your respondents in order to advance your career I am really not sure about your ethics…
come on danny, you must have some sort of explanation! i can see you’re still logged in!
Ok, the questionnaires are based on serious research that I’ve done, the second one is a standard mood questionnaire used in a lot of experiments which is backed up by a lot of research. I’m studying at the University of Leeds, in my third year and the research is for my dissertation. I’m not an anti-drugs researcher, I believe that people should have complete freedom to do what they like, as long as it does not impinge on another person.
The 2 completed questionnaires are copied and saved into an anonymous file as a participant number and the email is deleted straight away, I check it twice a day.
Sorry I didn’t explain this better, I should have done. If anybody wants to know anything else just post a question up.
Also sorry this was my first post but I just found the site, its well good. I am really into the drum & bass scene here, was at Momentum’s 3rd birthday thing last night if anyone has heard of it?…
Anyway though… sorry.
Danny
i would say in the first part, you need to break you questions down into smaller componant parts. q9 and 910 specifically, require quite a lot of detialled thought, and just from a compiling point of veiw looks to be a nightmare. surely you want answers that are easily comparable, with short answers? doesnt look like youve taken that into account. it looks like you want the interveiwee to do most of the leg work.also teh last question seems obviously present to get a certain set of assumptions.
go and have a look at other drugs reasearch, and you will see that if you want to put questions like that in, you could at least hide them a bit inbetween other more innnocuous ones.
in the second part, there are 65 moods listed. 15 are positive. surely you must see the bias in that. you say thats its based on “a lot of research” but that in itself its such an unbeleivably unsubstantiated statement its almost insulting. who did the research and for what purpose?
it seems to me almost unbeleivable that you are studying at degree level from the quality of this questionairre. i think that more than anything is what makes people wary. youre either dense, lazy or pretending to be. i hope you’re just lazy.
good luck getting better at your course. are you really that interested inpsychology? if so, pull your fiunger out, you’ll never pass with this shit.
that does seem to be what it boils down to
there aren’t even any control questions
still, i respect danny for coming back and fighting his corner, it must have been hard dealing with our veiws ( i know i wasnt exactly understated). and i really appreciate him openign the debate instead of getting to defensive.
well done geez, come back and continue, its all about progress!
cruel to be kind :you_smart
onli illegel drug av took is weed man but woondi mind it as a ONE OFF lyks :)..long as someone is there for my downer hehe
Believe it or not I do appreciate the criticism at least its constructive :satisfied Its all points for the discussion section of the report.
The first questionnaire isn’t going to be analysed in the statistical sense, it’s used to separate people into the different groups, which will then be compared on scores of the second questionnaire. The first one I wrote, and the questions are tailored to the needs of my study, although the questions are fairly standard for this type of questionnaire. Questions 9 and 10, if I get enough responses, will allow me to have poly-drug using and non-ecstasy poly drug control groups, but for this I’ll have to list drugs that have been tried and are used regularly.
The second one was developed by McNair et al in 1971 and measures 6 different mood ‘dimensions’; anger-hostility, depression-dejection, tension-anxiety, vigor-activity, fatigue- inertia, and confusion-bewilderment. Its used in a lot of studies and my supervisor suggested I use it.
You should maybe consider asking your uni tech department if they can set up a web form on their server for this questionaire which logs all the results into a database for you (which I assume the research will require anyway for result analysis).
That way you can save yourself some typing and data entry, and make anyone answering the questionaire feel far safer than doing it by email (which is about as far from secure as it’s possible to get without using spray paint and a handy wall…:smile: )
As for the test itself – the POMS test is primarily a diagnostic tool for spotting mental ill health resulting from long term illnesses is it not? (and therefore will tend to bias towards the negative). Not that it isn’t useful for the type of study you are doing, but would maybe adding one of the personality type tests (enneagram, big 5, MBTI – whichever you feel is best (I’d say big 5 personally, as it makes more sense than the bipolar tests, and will take less time to fill in than the enneagram…:wink: ))
That way, you would get some idea of basic personality to go with the mood assessment (helpful because then you can gauge the significance of the mood result in some sort of context).
You could also if you were feeling very keen (and can find someone to write the web code for it) do a simple cognition/pattern recogntion test so you can check for any patterns between basic mental function and moods….:bigsmile: :bigsmile:
But do find some way other than email to do it – then lazy people like me will
a)find it easy to take part, and
b)could do it several times (before, during and after possibly….any excuse will do to have a party :bigsmile::bigsmile::bigsmile:)
Good luck with it though, and let us know if you manage to get a web page for it…
:bigsmile: Edited for the inclusion:
consider assigning patient numbers and (shock horror) giving them out which would at least allow respondents to log in anonymously to continuing survey;
:question_ could we also see the full abstract/ theory for which this survey was designed to test results; then we can comment on what we think of the experimental method being used to collect the data.
:question_How are you recruiting a control group for the survey given the extremely limited parameters you define in the drugs history questionaire? I assume you have one?
:question_ Why did you choose this dissertation/ what is your personal slant and how will it interfere with how you interpret the data? {dont try telling me you are perfectly objective; humans by design are subjective in data interpretation and design of data interpretation systems}
I take this opportunity to repeat worries about the mood criteria being used; find something less negatively weighted if you want accurate results
:horay::biggreen: Will be watching the thread for your reply
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