This is the last week to donate! The fundraising drive ends on Thursday, November 30th! As one of our final updates, I want to provide an overview of what goes into creating a new way to measure eating disorder symptoms!

This process looks a bit different from scale to scale since there are different ways to do this work, but this is a brief overview of our process:

1.  First, we are creating the questions that will be asked in the scale. These questions are created from the team's experience as researchers and clinicians!
2. Next, we are working with people who are experts in this area. To us, experts are trans and gender diverse folks who have first-hand experience with an eating disorder, eating disorder advocates, eating disorder professionals who work with TNB folks with eating disorders, and researchers who do this work. People may (and often do) fill many of these roles at various points in their lives or at the same time! When we work with these experts, we will be reviewing the questions we came up with to take feedback and respond to that feedback by rewording, adding, or removing questions to ensure what we ask is what is important for understanding trans folks' experiences with eating disorders.
3. After we have our initial questions, we have a lot of people respond to the questions (and a few other things) to get the data we need for our first step of analysis. This analysis will allow us to understand which questions best measure symptom severity! The results of the analysis will also let us know what questions should be asked in the final version of the new measure.
4. When we finish our first set of stats and figure out which questions are best, we will have people respond to the shortened, new measure and other important scales in our field! This lets us validate the results from the first time people responded to the measure and make sure our new measure can help us better understand eating disorders among TNB people. This set of responses will also allow us to do more analyses to figure out things like what score on the measure might mean someone's eating disorder symptoms are clinically significant.
5. Finally, we will share the scale widely! The goal is to make sure the new measure is helpful, responsive to the needs of the trans and gender diverse community, and can guide clinicians working with real people. In order to best do this, we will seek to publish the scale and make it free for other clinicians and researchers to use.

As you can see, this is an involved process that takes time and resources. Your donation will help us make this happen! By working with community experts and making the results widely available, we can improve care for trans folks with eating disorders. This is only possible through the generous support of donors who support our work! 

Thank you to all who have donated so far! If you haven't donated yet, we hope you will join our mission to improve eating disorder care for trans and gender diverse individuals.

We wanted to say a huge thanks to everyone who has donated so far! We are so excited about the progress and working towards our goal! Want to know more about where funds are going? Read on to learn about our approaches to research!

One way we work towards fair treatment for participants in our research is by paying companies that maintain participant panels for research! 

What is a participant panel? Usually, this is a group of folks who have agreed to be contacted about participating in research! Our lab often uses a handful of companies that maintain a "pool" or group of people who have answered questions about themselves. Then, when labs like ours have surveys we want people to take, the companies open up participation to people who meet the qualifications we have set for our survey!

Why use these companies? There's a few reasons we like to use them! Here's our top three:

1. We're better able to reach people who meet our specific groups of interest from all across the country! 

2. By using these companies, we know the people who take our surveys are real people who meet our inclusion criteria. There have been a lot of problems over the last few years with bots and other computerized systems responding to research surveys, especially when researchers offer compensation. Using companies that maintain participant pools helps us avoid this concern! 

3. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it lets us fairly compensate our participants. We know that participants are the cornerstone of the research we do, and we believe their time is valuable. Offering compensation for completing surveys often increases the chances bots will take them if they are circulating on the internet. When we want to do research with broad, national reach, participant panels are a great option! We are able to pay the company for their service of maintaining the participant pool, which allows us to collect the data and complete our research. In return, our participants are rewarded with payment! We make sure our participants are paid at least an equivalent of $12/hour, which is then pro rated to however long the survey is estimated to take. We believe research participants should be treated fairly, and this is a big part of that!

If you plan to donate or have already donated, know that your money is helping fund this process and ensuring that trans and queer folks who offer their time to complete our research are taken care of.