Things To Check Before Submitting a Proposal to the
Research Review and Ethics Committee

Some of the same issues reoccur across researchers and across proposals from the same researcher. The committee asks that you check your proposal for the following common mistakes before you submit. You will have to make the changes either before you submit to the committee or afterwards, so please be kind to the committee and make the changes before.

Before you submit your proposal to the Research Review and Ethics Committee, please make sure that

  • you are using the current Research Information Sheet (revision 10/24/2011), consent document and debriefing which can be found at < and are available from the Psychology group on Porches.
  • all materials have been carefully proofread and are relatively free of typographical and grammatical errors. The committee sees lots of these types of issues that are no longer reported to you as they do not occur on the consent or debriefing. Sometimes, these issues are likely to affect your results to one degree or another as questions are badly mangled enough to no longer make sense.
  • the materials are logically consistent with themselves. That is, don’t say one thing in one place, and contradict that statement in another place of your proposal.
  • the Research Information Sheet, Consent Form, Debriefing Form, questionnaires, release forms, sample stimuli, etc. are submitted in a single electronic file.
  • your response to item seven of the Research Information Sheet explicitly states that the citations provide psychometric properties of the questionnaires that you are using.
  • your response to item seven of the Research Information Sheetexplicitly states for each questionnaire whether the questionnaire is in the public domain, used by permission, used under fair use guidelines, or is self-developed.
  • you are careful with the number and type of demographic questions that you ask. A person’s responses to the demographic questions can easily uniquely identify the person if they have atypical responses. For example, it is unlikely that there is more than one Native American who is 42 years old in PSY 101. If you ask that person for both his/her race and age, then the person is uniquely identified based on his/her responses. Consider removing demographic questions that are not central to your hypothesis and that are not required by publication standards. For demographic questions that are central, consider using categories. If you want age information, you might include categories of 18, 19, 20, 21, and 22 or older. If the participant still can be uniquely identified, include a warning of that in the consent document.
    This issue becomes increasingly important as the risks posed by the rest of your study rise or if you are performing your study online.
  • if you are asking demographic questions, the description of the study on the consent document should state so.
  • the description of the study on the consent document includes sufficient information about the study that a reasonable participant can make an informed decision about whether they want to participate or not. The committee acknowledges that offering too much information might harm the validity of the data. Within that constraint, be as precise as you can. Stating that the participant will answer questions about self-esteem is better than personality which is better than just saying that they will answer questions (which is too vague to be approved.)

Before you submit your proposal to the Research Review and Ethics Committee, please make sure that

  • the description of the study on the consent document includes all aspects of the study that a reasonable participant might find unpleasant or might influence whether they want to participate or not.
  • the debriefing is educational to the participant. That is, jargon should be minimized and immediately defined if used. The debriefing should talk about why the study is being done – what others have found, what contribution this study will make, why the study is important. If you can relate the study to the participant’s situation in life, do so.
  • if you are using deception, that you make sure that the deception is absolutely necessary and that the goals of the study cannot be met without the use of deception. If you deceive, you cannot include anything about the deception in the consent form (that is, the consent form must accurately reflect what happens in the study) and you must remove the deception in the debriefing. The debriefing should clearly explain why the deception was necessary for your particular study, state that psychologists use deception only when necessary, and offer the participants the opportunity to have their data discarded.
  • if you are asking questions that might indicate that the participant might benefit from counseling, you must include the following standard language in the consent and debriefing forms:
    Adverse Effects and Risks section of the Informed Consent:
    Participants might experience negative feelings such as insert the name of whatever negative feelings your questionnaire might cause, e.g. anxiety while answering some questions. Counseling services are provided as a free service to undergraduate students. If you are experiencing insert name again, you may contact the University of Dayton Counseling Center at (937) 229-3141. You may call after normal business hours and the on-call staff member will return your call. If you feel any discomfort or distress while participating in this study, you are free to terminate your participation at any time without penalty.
    Contact Information section of the Debriefing:
    If you are feeling any distress associated with your participation in this study, you may benefit from counseling and should consider contacting the University of Dayton Counseling Center at (937) 229-3141. Additionally, if you strongly endorsed some questions relating to insert the name of whatever negative feelings your questionnaire might cause, e.g. low self-esteem such as give example items that measure the construct previously mentioned such as "At times, I think I am no good at all" you may benefit from contacting the Counseling Center for advice and guidance in addressing these feelings. The Counseling Center is available free of charge to undergraduate students. If you find yourself experiencing distress after the Counseling Center is closed for the day, you may call the number, will be connected to an answering service, and a counselor will return your call.
  • studies that take less than 30 minutes to complete grant one half research credit.
  • you have designed your studies to minimize their impact on the subject pool. The subject pool is a shared resource.

Before you submit your proposal to the Research Review and Ethics Committee, please make sure that

  • all individuals who test participants, interact with participants (e.g. confederates), and / or see the raw data have completed the CITI Social & Behavioral Research Investigators course prior to submitting your proposal to the committee. DO NOT complete the Social and Behavioral Responsible Conduct of Research course (in Question 2) – it does not satisfy the requirement. A refresher course needs to be completed every three years. The completion report can be printed and given to the chair of the Research Review and Ethics Committee or you can save it as a PDF file and email it to the chair of the committee.

Studies that collect data online pose additional issues. If you ask questions that might be harmful to a participant’s reputation, employability or financial standing if there was a breach of confidentiality then you must ensure the following:

  • When the participant is answering the questions that all communication between the participant’s browser and the web server are secured through an SSL connection. In simple terms, that means using a web address that starts with https instead of http. Note that SONA and the free version of SurveyMonkey do not meet this criterion. It is the researcher’s responsibility to assure the committee of this for the particular survey software that you use.
  • When the data are stored in a database, the data must either be anonymous – no personally identifiable information (this includes IP address which are recorded by default in SurveyMonkey, keys that link the data to a person’s name (such as might be generated by an email solicitation that is unique for each participant), or sufficient demographic information to make the participant identifiable given the population), – stored with public key encryption (so that employees of the survey company cannot decode the information), or that the employees have been trained in the treatment of confidential, research data.
  • When you download the data, that the data are either encrypted (see the previous point) or transferred through an SSL connection.
  • If you used deception, there must be a way for you to remove a participant’s data from the database and from the backups that the survey company generates.