Distress Brief Intervention: paper or online evaluation form

Completing a paper or online evaluation form

Do I have to take part?

No. Taking part is voluntary. You are being invited to take part because you have been offered a referral to DBI level 2. You do not have to take part if you don’t want to. Whether you take part or not will not affect the support that you receive from DBI.

What’s involved?

You are being invited to fill in a short questionnaire about your experiences of DBI. You will be given the opportunity to take part in the evaluation at your first and last support sessions.

We would like to link this information to the routine data that is collected about you by your DBI practitioner. We would also like to ask your permission to access the outcomes of the DBI plans which you will be developing with your DBI support worker to help us understand how the DBI intervention works in different places and with different people. To link this information with your questionnaire, we would use a unique code to protect your identity on any study documentation. This information will not include any personally identifiable information such as your name or contact details. Your DBI practitioner will talk to you about whether you are happy to have your data shared with the evaluation team, and will give you a consent form to sign.

We would also like to contact you in around three months to see how you’re getting on and invite you to take part in an interview. If you are happy for us to contact you, you can give your contact details on the evaluation form and we will send you further information on what this would involve.

Is the research confidential?

Yes. We will treat information you give in the strictest confidence under the Data Protection Act 2018 and the European Union General Data Protection Regulation. The results collected are used for research purposes only and no one looking at the findings will be able to identify you in any way. Your care providers will not have access to this information and will not know whether or not you decide to take part.

What will happen to any information I give?

Your answers will be treated with care and with full respect for your privacy. Information will be held securely by the Scottish Government for up to 5 years for research purposes only and will be managed in accordance with data protection legislation. It will not be possible for anyone not in the immediate research team to connect any information containing personal identifiers like names with any other information you give in the questionnaire and consent forms will be stored separately from any other information you provide.  You will only be contacted for research purposes.

Whether you take part or not, and any information that you give, will in no way affect the support that you receive from the Distress Brief Intervention team.

What are the risks or benefits of taking part?

There are no risks in taking part in the research.  Your responses will not be known by your DBI practitioner and it will not affect the service you are offered in any way, if you decide not to take part.  You can stop taking part at any point.

Your answers will help us find out about what Distress Brief Intervention is doing well and how it can be improved. Taking part is completely voluntary, but we do hope you will get involved.

Where can I find out more?

If you have any further questions, please contact Jessica Shields of the DBI evaluation team at ScotCen on 0131 240 0210 or at Jessica.Shields@scotcen.org.uk.

If you wish to make a complaint about this study you can contact Professor Jayne Donaldson (Dean of Faculty of Health Sciences and Sport, University of Stirling) on 01786 46 6345

What do I do now?

If you would like to take part in the evaluation, your DBI practitioner will give you a consent form and a paper questionnaire or a web survey to fill in. You can hand your completed paper questionnaire back to your DBI practitioner or pop in into the freepost envelope and it will come directly to the evaluation team.

If you do not want to take part, just let your DBI practitioner know.

For further information about how the DBI evaluation team processes personal data for research purposes and your data rights please visit our webpage: https://www.dbi.scot/evaluation-privacy-notice/.