From June 2019-September 2021, we will be inviting 30,000 children and adolescents visiting the Ontario Science Centre (OSC) to become Junior Scientists as part of research project called Spit for Science.We will ask our Junior Scientists and their parents to complete questionnaires about behaviour (the way you act), play a computer game to understand cognition (the way you think), as well as physical health and well-being. Using postal codes, we can estimate many different aspects of your environment (e.g., how close you live to green space or exposure to air pollution). Finally, we will ask our Junior Scientists to spit in a small tube so that we can collect DNA.We can discover how your genes work with the environment to impact your mental and physical health. Our aim is to recruit a sample of 30,000 children and adolescents from the community to further the understanding the etiology of childhood mental and physical health. In genetic research, size matters!This study is a continuation of Spit for Science 1 that ran at the Ontario Science Centre in 2008-2009. Spit for Science 2 will expand on Spit for Science 1 in four important ways, by:
Recruiting 30,000 new participants;
Adding new measures of behaviour (social communication and affect-regulation) and cognition (error detection and sustained attention);
Estimating environmental risks using geospatial mapping of postal codes;
Accessing health data via IC/ES; and
Exploring gene X environment interactions across aspects of mental and physical health.