Researchers

#MadCovidDiaries is a service user / survivor led project.

The #MadCovidDiaries team is frequently approached by researchers and organisations.  It’s great that #MadCovidDiaries is getting lots of attention!

Unfortunately, most researchers and organisations approach us with a view to using our diaries for their own research / publications / reports / data sets. 

We made a conscious decision to publish our diaries in REAL TIME.  We did this to influence change during the pandemic and to create a supportive community for fellow mad people. 

We did not take a traditional research approach, whereby ‘data’ (in our case diaries) is generated and kept under lock and key until publication.  We are making our ‘data’ accessible now because its the right thing to do. 

This doesn’t mean that we don’t intend to look at our own work in time! The project was not set up as a piece of research, however, the interest we have received from researchers has highlighted that the project is worthy of consideration from a research perspective. We have no plans at present to ‘analyse’ our ‘data’ using research methods. However, we cannot predict what will happen in the future. The service user / survivor research community is growing.  Whatever happens – the diarists and all contributors will always own their work – no one’s work would be included in anything without their permission.

We therefore ask all researchers / organisations not to use our diaries in their own data sets / analysis without first speaking to us.  This is our’s and diarists’ ‘data’, please act with integrity.

 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. We ask that you seek our permission before you use any of our material – this includes researchers who want to harvest our data for analysis!