kittenish
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- Apr 5, 2009
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Having had a chance to look at the actual survey, I can kind of see how it could have been mistakenly determined to be exempt (no greater than minimal risk). It would have still been an incorrect determination based on the fact that the researchers were not collecting directly identifiable information and would not have had an honest risk/benefit analysis considered. The description of their crimes could potentially identify participants and would raise the risk level of the research to greater than minimal/full committee review and may even require a prisoner representative to be present.Even we profs don't have much info about students. I have their legal residence (unless they clicked a box denying me that) and a legal phone number (and I'll say that not one time has any who can summon a student has ever answered a phone number that I've had for a student - ask me more if interested).
That's it. That's all we have. And they can get our residence, phone number AND our work schedule online. Plus a few other facts if they are diligent.
What TA's can do is send out an assignment asking for identifying information (highly unethical but unsupervised students doing research on other students is not uncommon and many universities have policies against it; but the profs and deans have to enforce it).
Also, a TA can simply type a student's name into google. THAT will turn up way more than any university-held info. In this case, though, the victims are at a different school than the murderer's.
(from the last thread) AND
Kittenish wrote:
This is such an excellent post but the last thread closed out before all of you got a chance to read it. It was in response to the Legend (MassGuy). And it is so true.
Not every college has a Human Subjects Research Protocol. Profs have to fill the gap. I would never approve a survey of this type (but I'm an anthropologist, not fond of surveys for many reasons) but I can't believe a competent psychology professor would, either. Although, I will say the overall topic is a good one. But attempting to engage criminals in research is quite a complex thing and should be subject to higher oversight than just a couple of psych professors.
Legal opinions should have been sought (before the research was okayed). I wouldn't have approved it because I don't believe in putting pre-doctoral students together with criminals (in any context, except one in which there is real life supervision of the interactions).
One other thing that stuck out is although he says the data will be confidential, that really doesn’t mean much. He doesn’t say it’s anonymous or that data will be collected/stored without identifiers. If he’s emailing the survey from REDCap, I believe the researcher has to manually set the the survey not to collect or tie responses to email addresses.
I also noticed he doesn’t say in the beginning of the survey that the study has been reviewed by the IRB, only in the advertisements. That made me go look up DeSales IRB forms. Non-exempt studies require specific elements of consent, whereas exempt studies can use an information sheet that does not include all of those elements. DeSale only has a full consent template on their website, so I assume that they do not utilize information sheets that are not based on the consent template language, which his introductory text does not match. No risks or benefits mentioned, no way to contact the IRB… those are significant omissions.
Based on all of that, I’m going to bet that this wasn’t an IRB-approved study. If they approved this, they dropped the ball big time.