Your child attended an information session today either at their school, youth group or sports club about the work we do at Generation Scotland and they were interested in becoming a volunteer to help improve future research into health and well-being. Image Currently we have over 25,000 volunteers who have helped with research into Covid-19, depression, dementia, heart disease, cancer and more, but excitingly for the first time we can now include 12-17 year olds, which allows scientists and researchers to study adolescent health including mental health. As your child is under 16 and since the study largely focuses on family health, consent is slightly different and they cannot sign up to volunteer directly. Instead their parent or guardian needs to join first and then invite their child to take part. Becoming a volunteer is easy and you can now do so from the comfort of your own home. This will include: Reading the approved volunteer information (which tells you what you will be asked to do, and why) Providing consent (agreeing to what you will be asked to do) Completing an online questionnaire which takes approximately 15-20 minutes Providing a saliva sample using an at home test kit which we will send out. Of course this is completely optional and may or may not be of interest to you. You can find out more about the work of Generation Scotland on our website and if you choose to join you can do so through our volunteer web portal. Once you have become a volunteer yourself and see what is included, you can then decide whether you are happy to invite your child to join too. If you have any questions please contact us at genscot@ed.ac.uk. This article was published on 2024-05-06
