Crowdsourcing Research questions in Science I

CRIS I took place within the field of mental health, pioneering the use of crowdsourcing to generate novel research questions. Analyzing secondary data and interviewing international experts, the field of mental health was carefully selected on the basis of the following criteria:

• high prevalence rates and widespread concern on a population level (including those directly affected and their relatives, all age groups)
• mental illnesses are subject to little research in relation to other illnesses (i.e. cancer)
• all age groups and social classes are concerned with mental illness
• highly relevant to health policy (the results of mental illnesses have drastic effects on society, i.e. early retirement, long-term sick leave, etc.)

Recent statistics indicate that 20% of all individuals develop a mental illness once during their lifetime. In a nutshell, research on mental illnesses is highly relevant on a public health, economic and policy level but comparably little researched.

How was CRIS I organized?

1. First, ideas, problems and/or proposed solutions were collected from a heterogeneous and self-selected stakeholder sample – the specific focus was on patients, their relatives and caregivers (crowdsourcing process)

In a second step, the suggested problem areas, research questions and topics were clustered by our analysis team (analysis process)

1. This step was followed by an evaluation (crowd voting + expert jury) and subsequently by
    
2. selecting individual clusters of questions that serve as an inspiration for new research activities.

The CRIS I online platform was open for 11 weeks from April to July 2015. During this period, patients, their caregivers, doctors or employers could submit their unsolved problems and open research questions in the field of mental health. Submitting a contribution to CRIS I required a pre-registration on the platform. All contributions were treated as strictly confidential and were, of course, subject to data protection. Participants had the option to delete their profile after submitting their contributions. In this case, the contributions remained in the system but could not be associated with the former profile.

One outcome considered particularly relevant was to study how mental illnesses of parents affect the development of their children. To be more specific, this involves:

• Early detection / diagnosis in different developmental stages of childhood and adolescence
• Effective prevention and strategies for building mental resilience in children and adolescents
• Therapeutic intervention and medication including trauma therapies

Dissemination: What happened to the Results?

Based on the research questions generated, the Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft hosted an Ideas Lab in May 2017. The Ideas Lab served as a catalyst to help scientists from various disciplines conceptualize and formulate research proposals within the scope of the identified research topics.
 

LBG provided in total € 6 million Euros over a period of four years to fund two Ludwig Boltzmann Research Groups on Mental Health for Children and Adolescents formed around the principal investigators and co-investigators arising from the Ideas Lab.

The Research Groups on Mental Health for Children and Adolescents will primarily be based at Austrian Universities.

Crowdsourcing Research questions in Science II

We ran our second crowdsourcing project in 2018. In this crowdsourcing project, we aimed to generate research questions within the clinical context of orthopedic Traumatology. 

Together with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Experimental and Clinical Traumatology, we gained new insights into the field and crowdsourced a myriad of research questions drawn from expert and patient knowledge that has not yet been addressed by research.