This project is being conducted by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin
and has been approved by its Institutional Review Board.

Title: Tracking Sensitive Behavior through Word Use
IRB study Number: 2009-12-0037

The last opportunity to begin our study is Friday August 19, 2011 17:00 CST.

Do you have a BIG secret?

Participate in an Email Study for $100

A federally funded research project is exploring how people use emails when they have been living with a very big secret. To be eligible, you must meet all of the following conditions:

Age 18 or older
Native English language speaker and emails must be in English.
Living in the United States during the time of the secret.
Use email on a daily basis and have kept your emails over the course of the secret.
Your email program must be Gmail.
You must have access to a computer that runs the operating system Windows or Mac OSX.
You are not suicidal or schizophrenic.
You must have started keeping this secret sometime in the past 6-7 years (i.e. 2004 or later) If you eventually started telling others about the secret later, that’s OK. Examples of BIG Secrets might include:

Being the victim of rape or other violent crime,
Being fired from a job,
Being arrested,
Having an affair or a secret relationship,
Having an abortion,
Committing a possibly illegal or immoral act,
Being depressed,
Witnessing or learning something damaging about another person,
Or anything else that you are keeping from others and is particularly distressing for you

You will not have to tell us exactly what the secret is. In addition to completing some questionnaires, we will want to analyze some of your emails. The procedure will guarantee anonymity to you and your email correspondents.

You can choose to receive payment after completing the first set of questionnaires and email downloads by either a $50 money order through the University of Texas, a $50 gift card from iTunes, Walmart, Starbucks, Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com. This payment can either be emailed or mailed to you. Another $50 check or gift card will be sent to you at the completion of a final questionnaire one week later. Your name will be required only if you choose to be paid by money order instead of by a gift card. The entire project should take 4-5 hours.

I have read all the information and I want to proceed to screening.

Overview

This project is attempting to learn how large personal secrets influence the ways we interact with others. We are particularly interested in studying people who rely a great deal on email and who have had to deal with an overwhelming secret in the last 6-7 years. If you qualify for the project, it will take about 4-5 hours of your time and should be interesting for you.

We understand we are asking a lot, which is why the $100 compensation. The study has been approved by our ethics review board and they oversee the project. Please feel free to also refer to the section on this page that describes How Your Privacy Will Be Protected. To give a few more details about how your email will be protected:

We will only take a small sample of the emails (you choose the contacts).
We will give you the software that we created and would be happy to give you the source code
You would run the software on your own computer.
The software uses the same protocols as if you were using Outlook or an email client on your computer.
The program will mask all email addresses.
You would upload the email (zip and encrypt it if you want).
we will then manually remove any names and personal information from every email.
The words in all the messages sent to you will be randomly jumbled.
You can remove any emails or information you want before ever giving us access to the emails.

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Who is behind this study?

Professor James W. Pennebaker in the Department of Psychology and Professor David I. Beaver in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin are the primary investigators. The work is funded by the Department of Defense with additional funding from the National Science Foundation.

Professor James W. Pennebaker: Personal website

Professor David I. Beaver: Personal website

The Research Lab: Pennebaker Language and Health Psychology Lab Group

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What will be involved in the study?

If you are approved to participate, you will be involved in each of the following phases of the study:

You will first talk briefly on the phone with one of the researchers who will walk you though the study and answer any questions you may have. You will then set up another phone meeting to complete the email part of the project. This phone call should take about 10 minutes.
You will complete a detailed consent form and then fill out a number of questionnaires, which should take 20-40 minutes.
At an agreed-upon time, you will talk with the researcher while you are sitting in front of your computer. You will download a virus-free computer program that will do a quick search of your emails and only your emails in the email provider that you specify. The program will then summarize your emails and select the most used email addresses. This will be on your screen and will never be seen by the researchers. Your job will be to answer a few brief questions about each email address. After you have completed the questionnaire, the computer program will then make a copy of selected emails to and from a small group of your correspondents. All of their and your email addresses, names, headers, footers, pictures, and other identifying information will be removed. You will have the opportunity to erase lines from the output files that this program generates before sending the output files to the researchers. At the conclusion, you will email the files to the researchers. At this point, an initial payment will be made for $50 either with a money order from the University of Texas at Austin or in the form of a gift card from your choice of Itunes, Walmart, Starbucks, Barnes & Noble bookstore or Amazon.com. If paid by the University of Texas, your name will be required. However, if you don’t want your name to be known by anyone, then all we can offer are gift cards. Either the money order or gift card will be mailed to any address you choose. This entire session will likely last about 2-3 hours. If there are problems, we may need an additional session that would last up to another hour.
Approximately one week later, we will send a follow-up email and ask you to complete one final questionnaire. Once you have completed that, a second money order or gift card will be sent to you for $50. This final questionnaire will last about 15-20 minutes.

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How will my privacy be protected?

If you are keeping a big secret, you probably don’t want anyone to know about it. We have gone to great lengths to guarantee that your secret will not be revealed through this study. Here are the main safeguards:

We will never ask you to tell us your secret. We will ask some general questions about its effects on you and others as well as how much you think about it.
We do not need your name, email, or phone number. However, we need to agree on some way to communicate. If you are nervous about your email, get a temporary one from Gmail, Yahoo, or other provider. We will need to talk with you on the phone. However, you can call us and simply block your phone number by using *67 before dialing. If you are concerned about receiving money orders, we can send you gift cards from your choice of Itunes, Walmart, Starbucks, Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com. Note that with gift cards, you will have to use them to purchase goods from the relevant store and cannot redeem them for cash. The one advantage of gift cards is that they do not require your name and, if you want to feel more secure, simply get a Post Office Box for us to mail the money orders or cards. Note, however, that we cannot cover the costs of renting a Post Office Box. Finally, we will mail you your money order/gift card in an envelope with the University of Texas logo on it. If you just want a plain envelope, let us know.
The computer program that you will be using should strip identifying information from your emails. In addition, you will be given the opportunity to go over the email file and erase any information that you might be nervous about.

If you still have privacy converns, we would be happy to speak with you. Simply contact us at TexasArchiveProject@psy.utexas.edu

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Will my computer and emails be safe?

Yes, the computer program that will extract your emails will leave your computer and emails on your email service provider intact. Once the study is over, you can delete the program and it will be gone forever.

Details

Email extraction program: The EEP will first produce a page of the top 20 correspondents that have been active in the selected year. The participant will see the email addresses of the correspondents and will then decide which corespondents they will include in the study. They will also make a judgment about each one, rating if the correspondent is a friend, coworker, relevant or irrelevant to the secret, etc. In addition, if the correspondent uses another email address, an option to combine emails from the various addresses will be made.

Outgoing email extraction: After the participant’s correspondents have been determined, a master list of the email addresses will be made and linked to an experimental ID. This master list will be saved on the participant’s computer and will be the only way to connect the identity of the participant with the email.

The EEP will then go through and select all outgoing emails to the correspondents, placing them in the equivalent of an excel file with ID, date of email, whether a group or individual email, and the text of the email. Each email will be stripped of headers and footers, hard carriage returns, html codes, embedded pictures, attachments, and previous correspondence. All email addresses will also be removed. In short, for the participants’ outgoing emails, the EEP Outgoing Email Datafile, the actual text of emails will be retained.

Incoming email extraction: For each incoming email, a similar datafile will be constructed so that each line of data will include ID, date, group/solo email information, and the words in the email. Emails will also be stripped of headers and footers, etc.

If you would like to see the source code for this email extraction program, please contact us at TexasArchiveProject@psy.utexas.edu

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Is there any direct benefit to me for participating?

Probably not. Although, we have been involved in earlier research on secrets and the mere talking about them has been shown to be helpful in reducing their emotional impact. In addition, you will be helping science by giving us insight into how people’s lives might change while harboring big secrets.

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