Coming from a physical science background I obviously don't have much experience of the social sciences. Last time I did a questionnaire I was 16/17 and studying GCSE Statistics and for the coursework component I needed to make a questionnaire that I handed out around the sixth form - all of us Statistics people did the same - I filled in soooo many questionnaires during my sixth form. We never sought ethics approval for any of it or had to worry about the implications of GDPR.
It turns out that filing for ethics approval in 2024 requires a tonne of work. I spent much of the weekend stressing over it. The ethics approval form itself runs to 18 pages, then there's the questionnaire itself, the sample interview questions and the participant information form. I finally got my draft versions of all of these finished and sent them to my supervisor very late Sunday evening. He'll get back to me with amendments I need to make relatively quickly and then I shall revise and submit to the university committee for their approval some time in early April.
The unexpected benefit to all this is that funnily enough I can take what I'm learning here and hawk myself out to researchers. Within the OU, we fairly regularly see calls for (paid) assistance running focus groups, transcribing interviews, doing questionnaires, etc. for staff who are running Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) projects. Their projects tend to be quite small and they're running them alongside their regular teaching commitments as a way to improve their own teaching practice and to improve the OU's courses; now the central academics are too busy with their own research to be getting involved in much SoTL so the call tends to go out to available ALs.
Ethics approval process
Coming from a physical science background I obviously don't have much experience of the social sciences. Last time I did a questionnaire I was 16/17 and studying GCSE Statistics and for the coursework component I needed to make a questionnaire that I handed out around the sixth form - all of us Statistics people did the same - I filled in soooo many questionnaires during my sixth form. We never sought ethics approval for any of it or had to worry about the implications of GDPR.
It turns out that filing for ethics approval in 2024 requires a tonne of work. I spent much of the weekend stressing over it. The ethics approval form itself runs to 18 pages, then there's the questionnaire itself, the sample interview questions and the participant information form. I finally got my draft versions of all of these finished and sent them to my supervisor very late Sunday evening. He'll get back to me with amendments I need to make relatively quickly and then I shall revise and submit to the university committee for their approval some time in early April.
The unexpected benefit to all this is that funnily enough I can take what I'm learning here and hawk myself out to researchers. Within the OU, we fairly regularly see calls for (paid) assistance running focus groups, transcribing interviews, doing questionnaires, etc. for staff who are running Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) projects. Their projects tend to be quite small and they're running them alongside their regular teaching commitments as a way to improve their own teaching practice and to improve the OU's courses; now the central academics are too busy with their own research to be getting involved in much SoTL so the call tends to go out to available ALs.