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Is Informed Consent Always Required?

 


The short answer is “no”. No, informed consent is not always required, but it usually is.

As a general rule, researchers are not required to obtain consent form participants if obtaining their consent will do more harm (broadly defined) than using the data without participants’ consent. For example, in the case of secondary data. Suppose you’ve decided to use your students’ grades in a previous semester to examine a research question you’ve just thought of. The students have since left Durham College because they graduated. In this situation, trying to track down each student to obtain their consent would be more harmful than using the data that the students already know you have access to since you’re the one who provided them with the grade in the first place. The reason it will cause more harm to obtain consent is because the researcher would have to try to locate and contact each student by finding them on social media, for example, which the student may feel uneasy about (psychological harm, which will adversely affect participants’ welfare). The TCPS2 states that consent is not required for minimal risk research when “it is impossible or impracticable” (Article 5.5A) to obtain it. This does not simply mean that it is not “convenient” to obtain consent. So, in the case of a 2-year or 3-year program, a researcher may still have access to students (through their own classes or colleagues’) and then the secondary research project would require informed consent. This was the case with the “pineapple on pizza” study where Clayton Rhodes, Cara Coulson, and I wanted to analyse the answers given during the IS Unplugged series. Since we (the researchers) still had access to the participants, we needed to obtain consent before being able to proceed with the secondary use of these data.

Another situation where consent is not required is if you are collecting data by naturalistic observation such as observing people in public places (you still need REB approval, though!). An example would be if you observed participants in a grocery store parking lot to see how many men vs women returned their shopping carts. Similar to the rationale above, it would be more harmful to participants to obtain consent compared to proceed without their consent. Article 10.3 of the TCPS2 specifies the rules surrounding this.

One final example is situations when it’s completely impossible to obtain consent, such as when using a publicly available anonymous data set (e.g., Statistics Canada) or investigating a question using historical data where all/most of the participants are deceased. In all of these examples, however, the REB makes the final determination as to whether consent is needed.

I also wanted to address one other item related to consent and that is the age of consent. Different behaviours have different minimum ages for consent, but we typically think of 18 as being the age of consent. As it relates to research, however, the TCPS2 does not specify a minimum age for consent (see Article 3.9 for a discussion of decision-making capacity). The key is that the participant is able to understand what they are agreeing to (i.e., the informed part of informed consent). So, if the researcher can make the information understandable and accessible to children under 18, they can consent without a parent/guardian needing to sign their consent form. So, if you plan to collect data from students, you don’t need to limit your recruitment to those 18 and older.

If there is anything I can do to support your research or if you have suggestions for me in my role as Research Coordinator, please reach out via email or pop in to my “office hours” on Fridays from 12:30-1:30pm on Whereby. 

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