FEM-FL stands for Family Experiences Managing Football Lives. This is a new initiative we are inviting you to join because you are a spouse or partner of a current or former NFL player.
FEM-FL stands for Family Experiences Managing Football Lives. This is a new initiative we are inviting you to join because you are a spouse or partner of a current or former NFL player.
After eight years of working with more than four thousand former football players, we at the Football Players Health Study recognize that professional football can affect family members in countless ways. This is where FEM-FL comes in – it is a pilot study on the health and wellness of individuals currently partnered with former and active football players. In our first survey, we plan to explore how aspects of life within the NFL may extend beyond players to affect spouses’ health and career trajectories. By gathering this information, we hope that this will lead to recommendations, creating interventions, and educational outreach that can be used to support NFL families.
We are asking you to participate in the FEM-FL Study because you are a spouse or partner of a current or former NFL player, and we feel that your experiences will help us better understand the effects of a career in professional football on families. Please know that the FEM-FL Health and Wellness Questionnaire is completely voluntary, your answers are confidential, and you are under no obligation to respond or share your decision to take part with anyone.
The FEM-FL Health and Wellness Questionnaire is available online and asks about your health, lifestyle, childhood experiences, physical and mental health. This survey will also ask a few questions about your current or former player partner and his health and football career.
The questionnaire takes about 15-20 minutes to complete, and you can complete it online via a secure web link on a computer or tablet. We recommend against taking the survey on your phone due to the nature of the online survey platform.
COVID-19 has had a significant impact on the mental and physical health of individuals across the globe. With these questions, we hope to learn more about how COVID-19 has affected your life.
The FEM-FL survey was designed to explore the health and wellbeing of partners of NFL players in a confidential and secure space. As a result, some of the questions on this survey may be sensitive or personal for you and your community. For example, FEM-FL asks about marital satisfaction, because it can impact health and happiness. All questions are optional and can be skipped. Your name and identity will never be associated with the questions you choose to answer.
Your privacy and confidentiality are extremely important to the Football Players Health Study team. All of the information that you share will be de-identified and stored separately from all of your contact information in secure Harvard University databases. At no point will you be asked to identify your partner. The questionnaire does not include your name or your partner’s name, but is labeled with a code. Only a small number of trained study staff will be able to link your name to your code. When study results are shared, only group results will be presented.
The study team has also obtained a Certificate of Confidentiality issued by the National Institutes of Health. This is an important protection used when collecting sensitive information and adds special protection for the research information that may identify you. With this, the study team may not disclose information that may identify you, even under a court order or subpoena, unless you give permission.
When you participate in a Football Players Health Study research study, you are agreeing to allow us to collect and store the data confidentially and securely for several years. This is useful and important as it allows us to look at changes in health and wellness over time.
We are not able to combine your data with information that we may have about your partner if he participated in one of our studies. However, if you choose to take part in any future studies with FEM-FL, we may combine the information that you share in this study with your future answers. We do not know how many future studies we will have in which family members can participate, but there may be many over several years.