I am currently conducting a survey as part of my MSc (Hons) in Health Psychology.
The research is based on well-being in individuals with type 1 diabetes and whether self-perceived glycaemic control, diabetes knowledge, locus of control (whether control is in the individuals control or others) and religious beliefs are correlated with well-being and also to investigate how well these factors can predict well-being in individuals.
This research would be very beneficial for the diabetic community by successfully measuring an individuals beliefs in these areas we can advise where the health system needs improving in relation to health professionals communication or diabetes education programmes. There is also a £20 raffle for an Amazon voucher for those who complete the survey.
If you want to contact me for any reason please do so via Private Message
I'm taking the survey. Will USA values (Mg/dl) for the BG questions cause problems for your data? I'm going to convert by /18. I noticed there's a few other UK usages which I think I'm interpreting correctly however you may want to consider using a version which will select for the country to address, for example, those of us for whom "biscuits" are "cookies"! To me, cookies are better b/c biscuits are often served with thick, floury sausage gravy and are a huge heap of carbs!
I also just completed it and felt it was aimed to folks who do not really understand diabetes, and a lot of the language is a little skewed for an international audience, such as ARs biscuit response. I also had a background feeling that the purpose (known or unknown) was to prove that few of us are truly knowledgeable.. If that is the survey slant, this probably not the place to request participation. Was it vetted for research purposes?
Some of the questions were truly nonsensical for me, and I do not understand the research track.
I thought that it was a neat survey. I don't want to talk about it too much because it's still going and there's some interesting questions because it wasn't clear to me what they are looking for. I'd like to see the results too.
It shouldn't make too much difference, I wish it was that easy to change for each person that takes part, but as I used validated scales there was strict guidelines on what I could change on the questionnaires, I am going to do some statistical tests to check whether different countries have any significant differences so I can control for them if there are problems with the blood glucose conversions.
As long as you answer the questions to what you think is correct, that is all I want, if some scores are few points out towards UK usages I can always discuss these results with caution.
Thanks for your help, I will keep these UK/USA difference in mind for my write up.
I will publish the results on the forum for those who want to see them. The knowledge questions may not be particularly difficult for some people but then again a few people found that they didn't know many of the answers and because in a lot of cases experience = knowledge I wanted to see whether control beliefs had any effect on knowledge. When I take the survey offline I will explain things a little better and let you know the implications the results may have.
British English sometimes amuses me. I wonder if the phenomena is mutual. In one question on the survey it asked if an ophthalmologist used a special "torch" to inspect your eyes!
I am British and some of the wording on the validated questionnaires did seem a bit odd to me, think they went a little too far with the wording, makes it sound a little bit patronising. The differences in how Americans and Brits pronounce words is quite amusing I must add.
What's sad is that I lived in England for about 5 years and still, I became confused by "tablets." "Torch," however, I didn't even notice. Makes me shake my head at myself.
If I didn't use validated questionnaire I would have made a more user friendly survey, so that all people can complete it with ease. If I had a few years at this rather than a few months there would be a lot of things I would have added to this.
Thanks to all of you who have completed this survey though, if you know any other type 1's please send them the link. I'm hoping to start my analysis in the next month and I will let you know the results.
Silly me, I thought tablets meant Glucose tablets, and it will not let me go back and change the original tablet question. Also, I use a pump and I do not take shots at all.. How does a pump person answer those questions?
As it is on knowledge the questions didn't take the status of the individual into consideration. However, I will take it into consideration with answers as I will know which participants are pump users and which ones inject, for example. Minor errors occur in these surveys, one of the flaws in using them but thanks for your honesty and thanks for taking part as well.
Me too! Looking at the literature, there is little work that discusses the insulin pump in regards to this area of research (being well-being and control beliefs), so it will be interesting findings whatever the outcome.
Some of these questions couldn't be answered by True or False, and they weren't candidate for 'I don't know' either as I did know the answer to be -- 'It depends'. Meaning they were lacking the proper context. Also the 'God' questions were absurd...
Finally does checking 'true' for using pump, override all injection questions? With pump, bolus delivery is a lot different, as I can micromanage, thus being able to inject tens of times a day, which in turn would render those stats meaningless, if pump users and pen users answered them.
The limitations of using validated scales and it has occurred to me that these scales may need revising by the authors as I've had discussion about the answers and some of them are debatable because with diabetes some of the lifestyle factors are not absolute like you were saying. It does depend with some things.
As to the pump, I will be taking that into consideration with the delivery of insulin. With the technology of today and the development of the artificial pancreas the scales do need updating to truly understand the effect of knowledge.
