Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Symptoms of depression are strongly correlated with trauma-based disability. In a recent Canadian study of 201 patients with spinal cord injury, 28.9% were treated for depression within six years of injury. It is well established that depression, following an acquired disability, is a significant barrier to successful Return To Work (RTW). My study will record the disability-related thoughts and feelings, or ideations, of injured workers. I will compare them, by category, to depression levels over the period of the study. By exploring these relationships, I will learn what categories of disability-related life experience, as represented by these ideations, are of most significance for counsellors and other health professionals to consider and explore when developing RTW plans with injured workers. To accomplish this goal, I will recruit 36 participants through the Workers Compensation Boards in BC, Alberta, Yukon and the NWT. For 12 months, I will gather daily data from each participant through the use of smart phones with a dedicated app designed to allow for easy input and coding. Each participant will log in to the app on their phone and check off what disability-related ideations have occupied them over the course of that day. These will include categories described as major life issues by the World Health Organization such as employment, transportation, housing, transportation and mobility, family and social relationships, and recreation. The frequency and intensity of these categories will be compared to depression levels that will be rated through the completion of monthly self-administered questionnaires by each participant. This research will be the first longitudinal study to gather disability-related ideations on an ongoing, real-time basis. By eliminating the confounding factors associated with long-term memory recall found in studies based on paper questionnaires, more accurate data will be available to assist injured workers return to work.