Hello Mumsnetters,
This is a post asking you to contribute to research. Usually, these sorts of requests are posted in the surveys section where they don’t get much traction, but we told Mumsnet HQ about our research and they were so supportive of our study that they gave us special permission to post in this forum. We’re incredibly grateful to them for the chance to reach a wider audience.
I’m Dr Christine Campbell from St Mary's University in London and I’m working in collaboration with my colleague Dr Nikki Hayfield at UWE in Bristol. We're conducting research on women's beliefs about menopause. There's not nearly enough research in this area, and what exists is mainly from a medical standpoint. There's a big gap in understanding what women actually think about menopause.
We've already collected data from a sample of 100 young women in their early twenties, using what's called a story completion task. They were asked to write a short story based on a prompt that a fictional character "Kate" has noticed her periods are erratic and her friend suggests it might be the menopause. Our participants were simply asked to write about what happens next. They wrote some very interesting things which we can’t tell you right now unfortunately, in case it changes your responses, but once we stop data collection we’ll share a summary on this thread if people are interested.
We want to see if older women have the same beliefs and that’s why we’re here, asking for your help. The story completion task is actually fun to do – you can be quite creative if you want and give ‘Kate’ a real story arc. Or you can just write a few lines – we’re grateful for all responses. The only criteria are that you have to be based in Britain and over the age of 35.
The ethics bit - we’re both academic psychologists working under British Psychological Society guidelines. We've received ethical approval from our universities, everything will be anonymised, you’re free to take part and withdraw at will. You’re welcome to get in contact with us if there’s anything you want to ask, our contact details are on the first page of the site or you can post below.
After all that, if you think you’d like to take part, here’s the link: tiny.cc/menopausestory
Thank you so much Mumsnetters. It’s never easy to recruit people for academic studies but we hope this is an issue close to many of your hearts and you’ll feel motivated to take part. We’re very grateful to each and every person who does. (And please feel free to send the link to friends and family.)