Researchers should please take note of the
following basic study requirements for using the StudyResponse
panel.
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You must have IRB approval from a federally
approved research institution (e.g., a university in good
standing with DHHS) for your self-report, anonymous research
project. You must fax (315-443-6886) us a signed
and dated copy of your IRB approval letter. The date on your
IRB approval must be within the past 12 months. If your original IRB
approval did not include web based recruitment and data
collection you must file and receive approval for an
amendment to this effect before using StudyResponse. We have
developed a template
recruiting message that you may wish to modify and
include in your IRB application or amendment.
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Your study must be anonymous and
confidential and must not request reports of highly
sensitive information (e.g., reports of illegal behavior).
Your web-based research data collection may not request any
personal identifying information. We very strongly recommend
that
your data collection not record the IP
addresses of respondents, or that you immediately discard
them from your data. We also very strongly discourage the
placement of cookies on client machines. We will test and/or request your assurances on
these issues, and if you insist upon collecting these data
you will need to provide a signed letter from your IRB
granting approval for these procedures. Prior to distributing the invitation for your
study, you will need to send us a zip file containing all of
your data collection pages and associated server code (e.g.,
ASP files, if any server is used for collecting identifiable
information about participants).
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You must
provide a licensing fee to the StudyResponse project for use
in providing participant incentives and for supporting
administration of the project. We can receive grant monies that
have been set aside for participant stipends and related
costs. All disbursements, either from your university or
from you personally, are to Syracuse University, which is a 501(c3) non-profit
educational
organization. Under the terms of our licensing
agreement the StudyResponse project delivers a
proportion of your licensing fee to respondents in the form
of random-draw incentives. It is possible to supplement this
proportion by designating additional funds for use as
incentives. We must receive your licensing fee at Syracuse University in advance
of recruitment for your study. The Researcher
Registration process calculates your fee based on draw
size and other parameters and also provides an invoice for
your use in obtaining payment or reimbursement at your
institution. The proportion of your licensing fee set aside
for administration of the project ensures our ability to
maintain a high quality panel through the management of
panelist inquiries as well as the deletion of non-responsive
email addresses. StudyResponse is not grant funded and the staff runs the project as an
academic service center.
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Your data collection procedures must provide
a method by which respondents can leave one or more response
fields blank/missing. Web-forms that require all fields to be completed prior to submission are
contrary to the ethical standards governing participants'
rights to opt-out or withdraw without penalty. Further,
federal and state sweepstakes laws have sometimes been
interpreted in a way suggesting that one cannot legally
offer a random-draw incentive unless there is a
minimal-barrier method of entering. The only
exception to this should be the StudyResponse ID field,
which may appear as the first field in your survey form
and which may be a required field (see item #5 below).
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Your web-based form
may begin with a field in which respondents can
enter their StudyResponse ID. StudyResponse ID numbers range from 2
decimal digits to 6 decimal digits. Your use of the StudyResponse
ID is optional, but collecting it will allow you to make
better use of the demographic database of respondents that
we provide to you following receipt of your license fee. A
StudyResponse ID is a randomly generated
number between four and six digits long that uniquely identifies each panelist and helps to
ensure the anonymity of the response process. You may need to make other
modifications to your web-based form as well, depending upon
the other samples you have collected or plan to collect. For
example, many researchers pilot test their forms on student
populations, and thus have demographic questions asking
about major, class standing, etc. StudyResponse panelists
are primarily employed U.S. adults, and thus may find such
questions confusing or vexing.
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At the conclusion of your study, we
would be pleased to receive a brief description or
abstract (in MS-Word or
PDF format) about your methods,
procedure, response rate, and so forth, as a benefit to
future researchers who use StudyResponse. We also ask that as a
courtesy, you also keep us informed of any publications
(journals, chapters, books, proceedings, etc.) that you
achieve that included data collected from a StudyResponse
Project sample and that you kindly acknowledge the StudyResponse
Project in your manuscripts, through citations, footnotes,
and/or author notes.
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