Rewards for Human Participants

[deleted-350131]

My project will entail getting 30-50, 9 through12 year olds to come and meditate 3 days a week for 2 weeks. Since this is a large commitment, I would like to give a reward (as most professional studies do), but I don't have a big budget. Any ideas for a cheap but persuasive reward to give out? There will be refreshments at the meditation class.

[donnahardy2]

Hi Olivia,

Welcome to Science Buddies!

You have selected a very creative and ambitious science project, and it's good that you are thinking about the important details like how to get your participants to show up.

I agree with you that an incentive would help with participation. Selecting items for 9-12 year olds is challenging, but here are my ideas: You can offer stickers, small games, pages from books of word-search puzzles or age-appropriate joke books. Perhaps you could make surprise bags that contain items like hair clips, toy cars, small balls or pencils and erasers. I recommend going to the dollar store and check out the toy aisle and arts and crafts section for packages that contain multiple items. Maybe you could offer a small craft project for the participant to assemble. I would be great if you could offer something that could be divided into six pieces since you want each participant to come six times. If you can, you can consider offering one or two nice, maybe $5 prizes and then give each participant a raffle ticket each time they participate to give them a chance to win the grand prizes. Ask all of your friends and family members to help you with ideas and perhaps also with financial support for this. Good luck with this part of the project.

I have some additional questions and comments that I hope will help make your project really excellent.

First, are you aware that you will need to get signed consent forms from each participant and from a parent or guardian? And, you may need to get approval from your local scientific review committee (SRC) in advance of doing your project, since you will be working with humans. Do check with your teacher on this subject. Here is information on the SRC from this website/

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... _src.shtml

Next, what is the purpose of your project? Here are a couple of news articles on this subject.

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... meditation

You should do more background reading on this subject in scientific journals. Look for experimental details to help you design your experiment. Make sure you have a control group and that you control all other parameters other than your test question. Working with 50 kids will give you 50 variables, but do the best that you can to make sure you are testing at the same time of day under identical conditions.

How are you going to measure your results? In doing a science project, it is essential to be able to measure results. Here is a link for a step-by-step guide for doing a science project.

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ndex.shtml

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.


Donna Hardy