Welcome to the Study of Mindful Aging and
Racial / Ethnic Trajectories (SMART)!
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 funded by the National Institute on Aging (R01 AG082080).
SMART collects data on cognitive health, social networks and other aging issues with middle-age and older adults from diverse backgrounds through a survey in order to monitor the health of the aging population to examine the interplay between cognitive health and social networks, and to address health inequities.
The SMART Team
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 fill out this form or contact us.
Frequently Asked Questions
Survey questions focus on cognitive health, social networks, other health topics (e.g., chronic conditions) and well-being (e.g., happiness).
Anyone ages 40 or older living in the U.S. are eligible to participate. Your citizenship
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 fill out this form or contact us.
As a token of appreciation, we provide $?? for completing the survey. There are additional incentives depending on your recruitment of other participants and ancillary surveys.
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.
Without a unique number, we cannot verify your eligibility and cannot assist you when you experience issues accessing the survey.
You may wonder why we don’t just recruit anyone who is willing to participate from community organizations, establishments, or events. The reason why we ask you to invite other people is that this type of recruitment excludes those who are not associated with them. Our study attempts to test whether social networks help more inclusive recruitment, generating data that are more representative.
Hence, you’re inviting others is critical for the success of our study.
If you have any issues with the unique number, please contact us.
Your answers to survey questions will be prepared as a research data set and shared with other researchers through a data repository at the University of Michigan as we have done with our previous studies (e.g., https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR37635.v1).
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 answer questions on the phone, you may schedule an interview.