Do you need MindSearch?

Are you a staff member from a university or hospital that needs a steady supply of volunteers for research? If so, read on to find out how your own MindSearch database could speed up your research considerably and save you both time and money.

Volunteer recruitment in the past 

Historically, each of the many research groups operating at the IOP would recruit their own participants independently through a combination of posters, email circulars, newsletters, websites, newspaper ads, and word of mouth. However, one of the drawbacks was that many potential participants could not be used as they did not meet the correct inclusion criteria. However, they might well have been suitable to take part in another group's study.

Without any system to coordinate this information, researchers would spend many hours tracking down volunteers willing and able to participate in their study. Also, members of the public would often phone up various departments asking if they could participate in any studies. Unless they happened to get through to the right person they were usually advised to keep a look out for posters in the community or to look through the IOP's website. By not having a single point of contact for potential volunteers, many people were turned away disappointed that they couldn't contribute to research.

The MindSearch database project

It is hoped that MindSearch will primarily be useful in making the process of research at the IOP more efficient, less costly, and less labour-intensive for the scientists it employs. By recruiting a more representative sample of participants it is hoped that the research we publish will be more easily generalised to the population as a whole. Finally, by giving volunteers the opportunity to participate in science we hope to increase public engagement in science and give many more people that chance to get involved. Most importantly, we hope that MindSearch will accelerate the pace of research into diseases that affect millions of people all over the world; Schizophrenia, drug addiction, Alzheimer's disease, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and Motor Neurone Disease just to name a few.

The future of MindSearch

Once established solidly at the IOP, future plans include an audit to gauge the gains of a hospital or university psychology department which uses a centralised database to recruit volunteers to take part in experiments. On the basis of this data it is hoped that other universities in the UK (or indeed, around the world), might become licencees of our recruitment package and share the benefits experienced by the IOP. If you'd like to find out more, please select the "contact us" page on the menu above. We also intend to carry out surveys of our users to better understand their reasons for taking part in research.

Case study: The researcher

Paul Wicks recently completed a PhD looking at psychological and emotional changes in people with a rare neurological condtion called Motor Neurone Disease (MND). Whilst traditionally thought to affect only the body (whilst leaving the mind intact), a number of recent studies had shown that a small number of people affected by MND had mild difficulties with certain psychological tests. In order to test this theory and answer some more questions that had arisen, Paul visited 80 patients with MND from around the UK including two very rare subgroups of patients that had never been studied before.

As a comparison group, he needed to recruit a series of healthy volunteers who were just like the patient group in every way; they had to be of similar age, have been to school for the same amount of time, come from similar backgrounds, that sort of thing. Recruiting the patients was relatively straightforward, after all their details were stored at the hospital! But how to find healthy people who would be matched on these background characteristics? He put up posters in churches, noticeboards, and local offices, submitted notices to community newsletters, gave talks to local charities, took out ads in the London press, sent emails to several companies, and asked his friends and relatives to spread the word far and wide. Despite all this, very few people responded.

Paul said "In the end, finding a group of healthy individuals willing to take part in my research was much harder than we had anticipated, and many hours were spent trying to hunt down elusive participants. The most frustrating part was how many people I had to turn away. Having reached out to them, I was unable to recruit them because they didn't match one or two inclusion criteria; they might have been slightly too old or suffered from colour-blindness. But it always annoyed me that every participant I turned away could well have carried out someone else's study, and vice versa!" 

Now Paul has started a new research project in Parkinson's disease, and it is hoped that this time the MindSearch database will make things much easier. He can submit a request to the MindSearch administrator which contains his list of inclusion criteria, such as age, gender, and years of education, and he will be sent back a list of volunteers who fit that description and have said they would be willing to be contacted. Paul said "This new approach has already saved me many hours which I can spend designing new research projects, writing grant proposals, collecting data, teaching students, and writing up publications to continue the fight against neurological diseases."

Feedback from Researchers

Victoria Manning - Research Coordinator, National Addiction Centre

"For me, MindSearch has proven to be an exceptionally useful and cost effective resource. I cannot estimate what it has saved me in financial terms but know that a mere 15-word advertisement in a local newspaper (which would reflect the ethnicity required for my study)  would have cost me £120 per week. However, even more priceless is the time saved. In my experience it has taken days if not weeks to seek the person who can grant permission to advertise in churches, job centres and other notice boards and there is no guarantee that the advert will remain in place.  Emailing details of the project with inclusion / exclusion criteria to a MindSearch administrator to then receive a list of  potential participants makes the whole process of recruiting controls straightforward and saves hours of researcher  time which can be better spent publishing research findings."

Susie Hales - Research Worker, Dept of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry

"MindSearch has been enormously helpful for gaining access to suitable and reliable control subjects. In the past we have relied upon advertising for controls using posters, e-mail bulletins and word-of-mouth, which has been at best haphazard and at worst frustrating and time-consuming. I would guess that Psychpop has saved us at least one hour per control participant, and has simplified the recruitment process considerably in terms of the amount of effort needed to identify, contact and enrol volunteers. For many researchers, recruiting control subjects is the most difficult part of a study. The MindSearch database is an innovative and efficient device to take some of the stress out of this process."