Perceived Barriers to Eating Well and Being Active for Acadia Students

You have been invited to participate in a research project being performed by Alexis O’Connell (Department of Psychology, Undergraduate Researcher) and Dr. Rick Mehta (Department of Psychology, Research Supervisor). The purpose of this study is to identify levels of and barriers to eating well and being active on the Acadia University campus.

 

Participation in this study will take approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes. In this time you will be asked to fill out four questionnaires. One questionnaire asks about intake of various types of food. Another asks about how active you are in a typical week of the current semester. The other two questionnaires will ask you to identify barriers that influence your ability to eat well and be active.

 

The purpose of this study is to determine if there are any barriers to students living a healthy lifestyle and the impact of those barriers on such habits. No matter how healthy or unhealthy you feel your habits are, your answers will be essential to determining if any barriers exist, what they are, and whether or not they are related to students’ ability to eat well and be active. For this reason, please answer as accurately and honestly as you can.

 

Participation in this study will not provide you with any direct benefits. However, the information gained form this study could be used to aid in health promotion initiatives on the Acadia campus, thus having the potential to indirectly influence your health. Furthermore, there are no anticipated harms or risks associated with this type of research. Although it is highly unlikely that you will be harmed due to your participation in this project, you have the right to seek legal recourse should you be harmed because of your participation (in other words, consenting to participate does not imply that you have waived your rights for legal recourse in the event that you are harmed as a result of your participation).

 

Confidentiality will be respected throughout this research project and no information that would disclose your identity will be released. Data from three of the four questionnaires will be stored in Acadia University’s secure Lime Survey database. However, the Diet History Questionnaire II houses its database in the United States. The U.S. Patriot Act gives the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) the authority to access any database without a court order, and the Act prohibits the owner of a database from telling others about any access by the FBI. Therefore, personal information that you provide in the Diet History Questionnaire II may legally be accessed by the FBI without your knowledge.

 

Your name will not be associated with your data. However, an email was sent to you with a study code, respondent ID and password to access the one of the questionnaires. You will be asked for this respondent ID both when logging in to the Diet History Questionnaire II and also on the demographics portion of the study in order to link the information from all the surveys together. The demographics page will also ask for age, gender, year of study and whether or not you live on campus. Aside from the login information, the DHQ-II will ask only for name and gender in order to properly analyze your food history information. The email that was sent to you will be deleted from the researchers email account after you have received credit for your participation in the study. Once the data has been obtained they will be securely stored in a password locked computer, and all respondent ID information from the study will be deleted. 

 

Only group statistics will be reported, in other words, your individual responses will not be reported. The results of this research will be used for an undergraduate honours thesis in psychology, and may be communicated to the scientific community at conferences and in journals. However, the results will not be used for any commercial purpose. In other words, no one will profit by your participation in this research.

 

Participation in this study will grant you 2 points in PSYC: 1013, 1023, 2013 or 2023. Participation in this research project is completely voluntary and you have the right to refuse to participate. Choosing to participate is not binding and you are free to withdraw at any time. However, completion of the study is required in order to receive research participation points. You are free to withdraw your data from the study, as long as you do so during this session; because your data will not be associated with your consent form, we will not be able to track the questionnaires that you filled out after you have completed participating in this study. Finally, you are welcome to contact the primary investigator at any time should you have any questions about this study.