Updates and Feedback!

Believe it or not, we are up to 9741 participants. A big thank you to all the families who have taken part in our study. We will surely be celebrating once we reach 10,000 participants! If you're visiting the Ontario Science Centre over the next few weekends, the 10,000th participant could be you.

Here is some feedback we received from a family who took part in Spit for Science:

"Our family just wanted to drop you a line to let you know that Spit for Science is a brilliant idea. Having our children participate directly in an 'experiment' has lead to one of the more animated dinner conversations in our house this weekend! We have never been asked so many health/science questions before. I think we covered sampling, statistics, behaviour disorders, consent to treatment and DNA!!

You must also be congratulated on your choice of staff, lead by Hrag, as they were all knowledgeable, approachable, kid-friendly and answered all of the crazy questions that kids (and parents) will always ask!"

If you or your family has taken part in Spit for Science and want to give us some feedback, feel free to leave a comment below. We would love to hear your thoughts!

Photo Update!!

We recently had a camera on hand to capture some fun "Spit for Science" moments

One of our team members, Alex, watches 2 kids complete the "Stop Task"

Participants answer questions about themselves or

their child on our computerized survey

3 participants work enthusiastically on their spit samples

One of our team members, Anoush, collects a completed spit sample

We had a very busy March Break!

Thank you to all the kids, teens and parents who took part in our study during March Break. We had a very impressive 654 participants, bringing our total number of participants up to 9176!

We are looking forward to breaking the 10,000 mark, and hope to see you at the Science Centre in the coming months!

Over 8000 people have "Spit for Science"

Over 8000 visitors to the Ontario Science Centre have participated in our "Spit for Science" project! We look forward to recruiting new participants during the Family Day weekend in February (Saturday February 13th, Sunday February 14th and Monday February 15th). See you then.

More results!

Figure 1

Figure 2

These figures represent the distribution of scores on the measure of obsessive-compulsive (OC) traits we are using at the Ontario Science Centre, based on a parent reports of their children. The horizontal ("X") axis represents various total scores on the questionnaire which contains multiple items quantifiying different types of OC traits. The vertical ("Y") axis shows how often these scores occur in the population.

The distribution of scores approaches a normal distribution (see blog entry dated September 23, 2009 for an explanation of a normal distribution) but is slightly "skewed" leftward (or downward). However, despite the fact that parents tend to report low scores on this measure, there is still a very wide range of scores and quite a few children with high levels of OC traits.

In Figure 1, the total distribution of scores is illustrated.

In Figure 2, different curves are shown for boys and girls. Boys, shown in blue, are found to have slightly lower scores than girl, shown in red.

Spit for Science on YouTube!

Check out these YouTube links to learn more about the Spit for Science project!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KymFTM86lI8&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aYJZq-F7fY

Basic facts about our participants

As you know, all the data collected so far is anonymous in all cases and there is no possibility that the scientists/researchers or anyone else can link genetic or behavioural data with a particular person. That being said, we are able to determine some characteristics about our participants as a group. For example:




The average age of participants is 10.7 years old







49.11% of participants are male and 50.89% are female - almost even!









155 twin pairs have participated in the study (i.e.: both twins have taken part)