MOTIVATIONS OF VOLUNTEERS FOR A PARTICIPA TION IN AN INTERVENTIONAL STUDY IN THE FIELD OF NUTRITIONAL PREVENTION - RESULTS OF A PILOT-STUDYOF THE SU.YI.MAX SURVEY

In this paper, we try to understand the motivations and characteristic s of people susceptible to be volunteers for the SU.VI.MAX study. The objective of this study will be to recruit and to follow during 8 year s, a cohort of 15,000 subjects at a national level, for ran interventi on trial in the field of nutritional prevention. A short mediatic camp aign has been organised to recruit <<1,000 volunteers to help to test and to validate tools specifically developed for the SU.VI.MAX study>> . In total, 15,789 subjects matching selection criteria answered to ou r invitation. All received a short questionnaire; 10,984 sent back cor rectly filled up questionnaires (70 %) and 1005 were selected al rando m for a complete analysis. A lexical analysis of motivations disclosed 6 different groups organised in two poles. The pole of true altruists with a speech relative to notions such as <<volunteers-benevolent>> ( 7 % of subjects), wishes to participate to a <<humane task>> (9 % of s ubjects) or to progress of medical research (27 % of subjects). The ot her pole corresponds to people interested personally by the theme of t he project with 3 kinds of speech: personal past history (13 % of subj ects), interest for foods fortified with vitamins and/or minerals (19 % of subjects) or for relationships between food consumption and healt h (22 % of subjects).