Research question: DOES LIFESTYLE REALLY MATTER?

Dr Judy Ford, University of South Australia

Please answer this confidential online survey and help me to find the answer to this important question. I expect that it will take you less than 10 minutes to complete all the questions. One question (the most difficult) asks you to measure your waist. This doesn't have to be highly accurate and can usually be achieved using your hand-span or some string. If you are 18 or older and would like to help, please click here to take the Online Survey .

If you would like to see the results when they are published, please bookmark this page.

What is this research about?

We know that certain everyday habits are said to be healthy and others are thought to be bad for us. Smoking, for example, is linked to both cancer and to heart, lung and dental disease. But are there other good habits that make up for a bad habit and are there ways that you can judge whether a habit is already doing you harm? It’s one thing to be told that a bad habit will cause you an illness in twenty years time and to be sufficiently motivated to take action now.

This research has two main aims:

1.      To discover how good and bad habits interact with one another to make you feel healthy or not so well and to work out whether some habits influence your chances of catching common infections.

2.      To see whether good or bad habits have different effects at different ages. Should you change how you live at a particular age and if so when? Are men and women affected in the same way?

What does participating in this research involve?

If you volunteer to participate in this research, you will click through to the questionnaire. You will be asked your current age and the area of the world in which you currently live. Your answers will be completely confidential and you will not be identified. The system will record your email address as a means of ensuring that each person only answers once but this information will not be stored with your responses nor passed on to me or anyone else.

All the questions relate to how you usually live your life and how your health is most of the time. You will be asked questions about what you eat, how much you exercise and other questions about your daily habits. Other questions will ask you how you feel, whether you suffer from aches and pains or whether you always feel fine? The questions are all made by selection of a button or a drop-down list.

When will you find out the answers?

The results of the research will be published on this website when we have 1,000 participants and the analysis of the answers has been completed and published. This is real research, we can’t release the results before they have been reviewed by other researchers and it could take 12 months or more before the task is completed.

Your privacy

No-one other than you will know that you completed the survey. You are not identified other than by an ID number that is assigned at the time you complete the questionnaire. We do not collect any details that can identify you. Please click here to take our Online Survey.

Once the online survey has been completed by 1,000 people, the data will be transferred to a statistical program and analysed by me, Dr Judy Ford. Once the data is analysed and published, it will be held in safe storage in the Office of the Centre for Rural Health & Regional Engagement of the University of South Australia. If you have any questions about ethical aspects of this research, you should contact the Ethics & Compliance Officer, Ms Vicki Allen by email: Vicki.Allen (at) UniSA.edu.au or phone her on +61 8 8302 3118.

Thank you for your help.

Dr Judy Ford

 This project has the approval of the Research Ethics Committee of the University of South Australia.