Dr. Toni Schmader holds the Canada Research Chair in Psychology at the University of British Columbia and is the director of the Consortium on Engendering Success in STEM. Dr. Hilary Bergsieker is an associate professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo. Dr. Schmader and Dr. Bergsieker jointly lead the Project RISE team, which is comprised of postdoctoral researchers, technical staff, and both graduate and undergraduate students.

Dr. Schmader can be contacted at rise@psych.ubc.ca or 604-822-6205. Dr. Bergsieker can be contacted at essrise@uwaterloo.ca.

To be eligible to participate, you must work full-time as a scientist, tech professional, engineer, or mathematician. If you wish to clarify your eligibility, feel free to email us at: RISE@psych.ubc.ca.

The time commitment for participants is estimated to be 10 hours over the span of two years. (4.5 hours up front, 3.5 in Year 1, and 2 hours in Year 2).

Each organization has an internal deadline for recruitment purposes; your organization’s liaison for this study has that information for you. If you are unsure of who to contact in your organization, you can email us at rise@psych.ubc.ca.

You will be randomly assigned to complete one of two workshops on Collaborative Cultures. The workshop will be approximately 4 hours for one day at a location chosen by your employer.

Assignment to workshop is determined at random (with constraints for eligibility) using a process known as “stratified random assignment.” This method allows the research team to test whether participants in the different workshops have different experiences and outcomes. To conduct a true experiment, we randomly assign people to different workshops to minimize any systematic reason that participants in one workshop would be different from the other workshop. Random assignment is the hallmark of rigorous science when testing interventions.

Volunteers will be randomly assigned to 1 of 2 workshops, so any two individuals have a 50% chance of being in the same workshop.

Where possible, we will accommodate availability constraints. Please report any such constraints in the Sign-Up Survey.

The workshop will be facilitated by members of our team, consisting of one professional facilitator, one Project RISE Social Science team member, and one to two highly qualified personnel.

Participants are expected to work as a group on a team-based challenge, talk with other workshop participants, engage with Q&A/brainstorming conversations, complete worksheets, respond to survey questions/questionnaires, and agree/adhere to workshop expectations which will be outlined at the beginning of the workshop.

Here on the Project RISE site: projectrise.ca.

No.

There will be 15-30 participants in each workshop.

Yes, lunch will be provided by your organization. Please notify your organization’s liaison of any allergies or dietary restrictions. If you are unsure of who to contact in your organization, you can email us at rise@psych.ubc.ca.

Please register via the Project RISE Sign-Up Survey.

Expectations of confidentiality will be established at the beginning of each workshop. No content of any discussions occurring during the workshops will be shared with your employer.

Only qualified members of the research team will have access to your survey responses or any other data that may be linked to your identity. No information that could potentially be used to identify you will ever be shared outside of the research team. For more information on the types of information that may be shared from this study, please see “Who will have access to the data that is collected?” below.

Once you have signed up via the Project RISE Sign-Up Survey and your eligibility has been confirmed, you will be contacted at the email address you specify with each survey link (the survey links will not go through your employer). The only information relating to your identity that your employer will receive is a list of employees who participate, for the purposes of estimating employee time spent on this project.

Once all data for the project have been collected and saved to the Project RISE repository at UBC, the research team will permanently delete all responses to the survey from the server. To ensure that all information potentially necessary for analyses has been obtained, we will apply a 90-day period from the close of data collection for data verification and cross-checks before deleting the data from the server.

If your email address changes or you leave your organization during the study, you will have options to update your contact information.

Your employer will receive only aggregate statistics (e.g., means, frequencies) for their employees who participate in the study. No individual-level data will ever be shared with your employer.

Anonymized quantitative data from this research study may be made available to qualified academic experts only (e.g., journal editors) for purposes of publishing. For the purposes of reproducible statistical analyses, we will publish the covariance matrices and the means for each workshop condition (averaged across all organizations) in an open science data repository (osf.io). Please note that it is not possible to identify either participants or organizations from this aggregate-level information.

Please notify the research team (at rise@psych.ubc.ca) and your organisation’s liaison immediately so that they can update the workshop assignments and notify any waitlist participants.

Please register via the Project RISE Sign-Up Survey.

Please bring whatever personal items you may need to participate in a half-day workshop (e.g. reading glasses), which involves writing/completing questionnaires or worksheets, viewing PowerPoint slides, talking with other workshop attendees, group tasks, etc. Workshop materials and writing implements will be provided with the workshop.

Yes, there will be a 20-minute break for refreshments and the workshop will end with lunch.

If you would like to sign up to receive a report on the general Project RISE findings once the project is complete, you can do so on the Project RISE website.

We hope that participants in the workshop will want to participate in the baseline survey and follow-up surveys; however, each part of the study is voluntary. For us to evaluate the effectiveness of the workshops, we need to collect data from attendees.

If you miss the deadline, please complete the survey as soon as possible. If you try to do so and see a message that it is closed, please complete the next survey when it is shared with you.

You will have the opportunity to update your contact information at the end of each survey. If your contact information changes between surveys, please update your contact information using the Project RISE portal or contact rise@psych.ubc.ca.

This project has been reviewed and received clearance from research ethics boards at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Waterloo. If you have any concerns or complaints about your rights as a research participant and/or your experiences while participating in this study, contact the Research Participant Complaint Line in the University of British Columbia Office of Research Ethics by e-mail at RSIL@ors.ubc.ca or by phone at 604-822-8598 (toll free: 1-877-822-8598) or the University of Waterloo Office of Research Ethics at 519-888-4567 ext. 36005 or ore-ceo@uwaterloo.ca. If you have further questions about the goals of this study, please contact Dr. Schmader by email (rise@psych.ubc.ca) or phone (604-822-6205).

Absolutely! We would be happy to receive your recommendation.

Yes, definitely! Please make sure your contact information is up to date so that we can follow up with you. We would like to track your experiences even if you have left your organization or if you have a new position within your organization.

If you leave your organization during the course of the study, your original employer will not be notified of your participation past the end of your employment period.

Please contact notify your organization’s liaison to arrange accommodations. If you are unsure of who to contact in your organization, you can email us at rise@psych.ubc.ca.

You can read more about Project RISE on this site: projectrise.ca

If you have additional questions about participating in this study, please contact rise@psych.ubc.ca.