The study will include two weeks’ data collection and an optional interview. Each part will take no more than 30 minutes, and participants will spend no more than one hour in participation.
After signing the consent form, participants will see a page with their unique participant ID (in the format of AA001) and the link to the AwareMind app in Google Play Store. Participants will install the app. During the data collection, participants should keep the app installed on their phones.
The data collection will start as soon as the participants log in with their assigned participant ID, and last for two weeks. See Section 6 Confidentiality for more information about data collection.
During the data collection, participants should keep the app installed on their phone and respond to as many surveys as possible.
No personally identifiable information will be collected through the app.
Each day during the two weeks, researchers will check the data quality. If a participant has a response rate less than 50% (they have responded to fewer than eight surveys and dismissed eight or more surveys) in a given day, they will receive an email from the researcher, explaining that their payment depends on their responses and encouraging them to respond to more surveys.
If the participant has a response rate less than 50% in each of the first three days, the researcher will ask them to stop participation by email and pay them according to their participation.
If after two weeks, the participants don’t make enough responses to get the full payment, we will offer them two options: to stop and get whatever amount of payment they deserve at the moment, or to continue for at most seven days until they can get the full payment. If they choose to continue, they can stop anytime and the payment will be calculated at that moment.
By the end of the two weeks’ data collection, if the participant has responded to at least 50% of all the surveys, we will ask them if they would like to join an interview. Otherwise, they will not be invited to the interview.
The debriefing interview will be one-on-one with the investigators, and will take no longer than 30 minutes. The interview will be audio recorded. The records will be stored in password-protected devices and UMD internal platforms (i.e., UMD Box).
At the beginning of the debriefing interview, the researcher will greet the participants, and thank them for their participation, assure confidentiality and anonymity of their responses, and ask the participant for consent for audio-recording the interview.
The researcher will ask questions about the participant’s experience during the study, goals and challenges in phone usage, and how they decided to continue or stop using their phones (see the supplement document: interview protocol).
The researcher will end the audio recording after all the questions have been discussed, before making the payment.