If you're a parent who is not sure whether you want to participate in the research, we would like to try to address some of your concerns here. In addition, you are always free to call Dr. Marion Underwood with questions at 972-883-2470, or email her at undrwd@utdallas.edu. Remember, too, that we are offering compensation of up to $300 per family participating in this study.

We certainly understand parents feel protective about family time and family information. We want to assure you of a few things.

The commitment to participate in our research involves short periods of time over five years time. We want to follow your child's development starting in grade three, and continuing until the eighth grade. We will need to meet with you and your child about four times over the course of five years. We will ask you and your child to come to the laboratory on UTD's Richardson campus yearly during the study for visits that will take about two hours each, and we will need to meet with you to fill out questionnaires at the very beginning and the very end of the five year study. These questionnaire sessions will take about 90 minutes each. We can schedule any of these appointments nighttime and weekends as well as weekdays, at your convenience. Although some work must be conducted in The Friendship Project laboratory, meetings to fill out questionnaires can be in the lab, at your home, or at any other location you choose. It is possible that as the study unfolds we will require additional meetings, but we do not anticipate this happening, or that it would be more than one or two additional meetings over the course of the five years.

Your family's confidentiality is assured in our research. The only people who have access to our individually collected information are the researchers themselves. Our final reports do not identify individuals, but rather are presented as statistical overviews from which we draw conclusions and make predictions. The reason we collect data on so many families is because we are less concerned with the behavior of individuals and individual families than with what is revealed in collections of data from large numbers of people. Information we collect about your child and family is private and will be protected.

Nothing in our research endangers your child or family in any way. We work under strict ethical guidelines. You may read the University of Texas at Dallas' and American Psychological Association's guidelines for research with human subjects at: http://www.utdallas.edu/research/hspolicy.html
http://www.apa.org/ethics/code2002.html

The Friendship Project research is funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, which carefully scrutinizes all applications for funds and holds research proposals to stringent ethical standards.

The research we are conducting in The Friendship Project involves no physical contact or collection of any medical information. Our research focuses entirely on observation and reports of social interactions.

 We hope you will decide to participate in our study. We believe that once you become involved, you will find the experience interesting and thought provoking, and you will have made an important contribution to our body of knowledge about how we all function in society, and how we make and keep friends.