Welcome to the Study
of Mindful Aging and
Racial Trajectories (SMART)!
SMART studies how brain health and social relationships are connected as people age. It collects information from middle-aged and older adults from all walks of life to learn more about these connections and other topics related to aging.
SMART is a collaborative effort between researchers from the University of Michigan, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and the State University of New York at Albany, led by Dr. Sunghee Lee, a Research Associate Professor at the Institute of Social Research, University of Michigan.
SMART is supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging (grant number: R01 AG082080, PI: Lee).
Participate
Thank you for your interest in participating in SMART.
If you have a unique code, you can take the survey here or schedule a telephone interview.
If you don’t, please contact us.
The SMART Team
Joanne Tian Ph.D.
Post-Doc Project Manager
Institute for Social Research
University of Michigan
Research Assistants
Front Row: Valeria Castañeda Saucedo, Gloria Zhou, Aya Moughni, Stephanie Morales, Phuong Nghi Nguyen,
Second Row: Jackson Notier, Yao Sun, Felix Baez-Santiago, Ali Alsayed Kassem, Jay Kim
Frequently Asked Questions
Survey questions focus on cognitive health, social networks, other health topics (e.g., chronic conditions) and well-being (e.g., happiness). You will be given scores on some of the cognitive health questions. People find the topics are interesting to answer.
Anyone ages 40 or older living in the U.S. are eligible to participate. Your immigration status is not applicable.
You need to be invited to SMART by someone you know or by the SMART team.
If you are interested in participation, please contact us.
As a token of appreciation, we provide $50 incentives for completing the survey. There may be additional incentives depending on your participation in recruiting other participants and in ancillary data collection.
The incentive payment is processed through Chase Bank either as a direct deposit or a check. You don’t need a Chase account to receive the payment.
The survey is designed to last 20-30 minutes.
Each invitation from SMART includes a unique code which is needed to participate in our survey. Each unique code can be used only once. Without a unique number, we cannot verify your eligibility and cannot assist you when you experience issues accessing the survey.
Your inviting others is critical for the success of SMART.
You may wonder why we ask you to recruit other people instead of just recruiting anyone who is willing to participate from community organizations, establishments, events, or online platforms. The reason why we ask you to invite other people is that this type of recruitment is not constrained by the venues or platforms we may choose. Also, our study attempts to examine whether social networks help more inclusive recruitment, generating data that are more representative.
If you have any issues with the unique code, please contact us.
We ask your name and contact information to process the incentive payment and to send you invitations. Please note that your personal information will be kept following strict practices set by the University of Michigan to protect your privacy and accessed only by the authorized research team members.
Your answers to survey questions will be prepared as a research data set and analyzed to generate aggregate statistics. They will be shared with other researchers through a data repository at the University of Michigan as we have done with our previous studies (e.g., Health and Life Study of Koreans, Project Positive Attitudes Towards Health).
Note that your personal information will be stored separately from the research data and will not be shared with anyone.
No.
You may take the Web survey using any device that accesses the Internet (e.g., smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, etc.). If you would rather talk to someone and answer questions on the phone, you may schedule a phone interview.