Posted by TILEd
8 February 2026Progress so far has exceeded expectations in terms of sustained participation.
One of my objectives in this project has been to make participation as seamless, as ethical and stress-free as possible. In practice, this means that in this study, participants do not have to shoulder the burden of having to ‘opt-out’ of the research. Instead, participants are asked to opt-in to continue to the next phase of data collection. If they no longer can or want to be part of the project, participants are informed that they do not need to take any action: data is automatically destroyed after a given deadline.
The rationale for adopting this ‘opt-in’ approach is to ensure that participants who remain in the project do so because they want to, and not because they feel obliged to, or are embarrassed to ‘pull out’. The risk to the researcher of ‘losing’ participants, in my view, is outweighed by the satisfaction of high-quality data, and sustained, pro-active participation: so far, over 90% of participants have actively chosen to remain in this study. Furthermore, of the participants who have been unable to remain in the study, some have also opted-in to allow their existing data to be retained in the study for analysis.