Pilot Information

Participant Information Sheet

1.                      Research Project Title:

Young Healthy Minds pilot study: identifying the risk factors and initial signs of early-stage mental health problems.

2.                      Invitation paragraph

You are being invited to take part in a research project. Before you decide whether to participate, it is important for you to understand why the research is being done and what it will involve. Please take the time to read the following information carefully and discuss it with others if you wish. Ask us if there is anything that is not clear or if you would like more information. Take time to decide whether you wish to take part. Thank you for reading this.

3.                      What is the project’s purpose?

We want to better identify people who are potentially at risk of developing a mental health condition, or who are in the early stages of developing a mental health condition. We want to do this so we can better understand how mental health disorders develop and ultimately so we can better identify and help people who are in the early stages of becoming mentally unwell. The results will form part of a postgraduate thesis and will be published in an academic journal.

4.                      Why have I been chosen?

We want to recruit 660 first-year and foundation-level students from the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University. Participants need to be over 18 but under 36 years of age (to align with the NHS’s early intervention services). We are looking for ‘general population’ participants, so you do not need any specific qualities or characteristics, and we are interested in both people who feel mentally well and those who feel mentally unwell.

Do I have to take part?

It is up to you to decide whether to take part, or not. If you do decide to take part, you will confirm your consent electronically, and you can download and keep this information sheet. You can withdraw your participation at any time up to the point of data aggregation. If you decide to withdraw partway through completing, you can simply close your browser. Once we have started to aggregate and analyse the data, we will no longer be able to identify and remove your data. This is estimated to be approximately two weeks after the initial data collection period (May 2025) but could be sooner. If you complete the survey but then decide you would like to withdraw, you do not have to give a reason. If you wish to withdraw from the research, please contact Dr Jayne Pickering on Jayne.pickering@sheffield.ac.uk. Please note that by choosing to participate in this research, this will not create a legally binding agreement, nor is it intended to create an employment relationship, between you and the University of Sheffield.

5.                      What will happen to me if I take part? What do I have to do?

This is a longitudinal study. It has an initial session (April-May 2025) a six-month follow up (October-November 2025) and a 12-month follow-up (April-May 2026). All of these sessions will be delivered online. In the first session, we will ask you some demographic questions, and a series of psychometric scales related to your emotions, cognition, lifestyle habits, attitudes, preferences, childhood experiences and wellbeing. All questions are forced choice (e.g., ‘yes/no’) and you do not need to write out any answers or elaborate with any personal details. There is only one question, where we ask you to outline a problem that bothers you and you can keep this brief. We will also ask you about possible psychiatric symptoms you may have experienced and mental health diagnoses you have. Please note, this is not a diagnostic tool, and we will not give participants diagnoses. Additionally, please note, we will ask about potentially traumatic childhood experiences. We will only ask these questions in the first instalment of the study and these questions are skippable if you feel unable to answer them.

Instalments two and three of the study will be the same as instalment one, but slightly shorter. We will no longer ask you for demographics, childhood trauma or autistic traits. Session on lasts approximately 35 minutes, sessions two and three last approximately 30 minutes.

A small group of people will be invited for an online interview after the survey data has been aggregated and analysed. We will invite some participants who seem to be doing well and some who seem to be struggling. This is an opportunity to discuss your feelings and experiences beyond the limited scope of a forced-choice questionnaire. The interviews are semi-structured, so will allow you to discuss things that feel relevant to you. We will use these interviews to corroborate the survey data. Please note, this is not intended as a treatment or an intervention. The interviewer will be blind as to why you have been invited and will not be familiar with your survey response data. We plan to record these interviews for the purposes of assessing inter-rater reliability (a way of determining whether other researchers agree with the conclusions the interviewer draws). If you are invited for an online interview, we will give you a separate consent form and information sheet at the time you are invited. Although we would encourage you to attend the interview if you are invited, your participation in that part of the project is optional.

6.                      What are the possible disadvantages and risks of taking part?

Please be aware that these questions relate to potential mental-health issues you may have. Accordingly, some participants may feel a degree of discomfort or distress when answering them. If you find this project in any way distressing and you are concerned about your mental wellbeing and would like some support, please see these resources. Other available services include:

·        NHS urgent mental health helplines

·        Call 116 123 to talk to Samaritans for a listening service

·        The Shout Crisis Text Line, which you can reach by text

·        Togetherall, an anonymous digital mental health support service open 24/7

7.                      What are the possible benefits of taking part?

Whilst there are no immediate benefits for those participating in the project, we hope that you will find the experience interesting. You will be reimbursed £30 for your participation (a £10 voucher for the initial survey, plus £10 for the 6-month and 12-month follow ups). You will be reimbursed after each instalment, via email, within 5 working days of your completion. Additionally, you will receive an additional £15 voucher if you complete an online interview, which will be emailed within 2 workings days of your interview.

8.                      Will my taking part in this project be kept confidential?

We will need to take your university email address to verify that you are a student at either the University of Sheffield or Sheffield Hallam University. We will also need to record your name, so that we can identify your data should you choose to withdraw part way through the project, or so we can invite you for an interview at the end of the project. However, this data will be separated from your data at the earliest opportunity. A list of names, email addresses and participant numbers will be securely saved away from the project data in a password-protected file. This means that at the point of data analysis, you are anonymous even to the researchers who are analysing the data. 

All the information that we collect about you will be kept strictly confidential. We will only analyse group trends and individual participants will not be identifiable in any reports or publications. We will make the data set publicly available (‘dataset’ refers to the quantitative data recorded in the Qualtrics survey and the online tasks); however, participants will be labelled with a number and there will not be enough personal data (e.g., age, sex) to identify any individual participant.

Video recordings of interviews are not confidential, but they will not be shared beyond the immediate research team, and they will be permanently deleted once the data has been transcribed, estimated to be within three months of data collection. Transcriptions of the data will have personal identifiers removed.

9.                      What is the legal basis for processing my personal data?

According to data protection legislation, we are required to inform you that the legal basis we are applying in order to process your personal data is that ‘processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest’ (Article 6(1)(e)). Further information can be found in the University’s Privacy Notice https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/govern/data-protection/privacy/general.’ As we will be collecting some data that is defined in the legislation as more sensitive (information about mental health and religious/philosophical beliefs), we also need to let you know that we are applying the following condition in law: that the use of your data is necessary ‘for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific research purposes or statistical purposes' (9(2)(j)).

10.                 What will happen to the data collected, and the results of the research project?

The data will be anonymised (identifiable by a participant number only, no names, IP addresses or email addresses). Researchers at the University of Sheffield will process and analyse the data. The data will be analysed and form part of a doctoral thesis and will be submitted for publication in an academic journal. Anonymised and aggregated data will be stored indefinitely, in electronic form. Data will be anonymised (separate from identifiable information, such as your name) from the outset.

11.                 Who is organising and funding the research?

This research was generously funded by a legacy endowment left to the University of Sheffield by Ms Mary Downing to support mental health research.

12.                 Who is the Data Controller?

The University of Sheffield will act as the Data Controller for this study. This means that the University is responsible for looking after your information and using it properly.

13.                 Who has ethically reviewed the project?

This project has been ethically approved via the University of Sheffield’s Ethics Review Procedure, as administered by the Psychology department.

14.                 What if something goes wrong and I wish to complain about the research or report a concern or incident?

If you are dissatisfied with any aspect of the research and wish to make a complaint, please contact Dr Jayne Pickering on Jayne.pickering@sheffield.ac.uk, in the first instance. If you wish to report a concern or incident relating to potential exploitation, abuse or harm resulting from your involvement in this project, please contact the project’s Designated Safeguarding Contact, Dr Jayne Pickering. If the concern or incident relates to the Designated Safeguarding Contact, or if you feel a report you have made to this contact has not been handled in a satisfactory way, please contact the Head of School, Dr Chris Martin, on psy-hos@sheffield.ac.uk and/or the University’s Research Ethics and Integrity Manager (Lindsay Unwin, on L.v.unwin@sheffield.ac.uk). If the complaint relates to how your personal data has been handled, you can find information about how to raise a complaint in the University’s Privacy Notice:

 https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/govern/data-protection/privacy/general.

15.                 Contact for further information

If you would like further information about this project please email either Dr Jayne Pickering (Jayne.pickering@sheffield.ac.uk), who is running the project, or Professor Richard Bentall (r.bentall@sheffield.ac.uk). 

Please remember to keep this information sheet for your records.

Thank you for taking the time to consider our research project.