Research Coordinator Blog

  Last time, I continued walking you through some of the sections of the REB application and giving you tips for completing them. This week, I will go through the remaining sections in the application and give you some general tips and reminders about the REB process. Full disclosure: I am a member of the REB (2012-present). These are my personal opinions and following my advice does not guarantee any particular outcome during the review process.          When completing the sections on consent and withdrawal (Section 6) there are a few important things to consider. Remember that consent is informed and ongoing, which means you need to give participants all the information they need to make an informed decision and that they can change their decision at any point in the research process without any negative repercussions. You’ll want to make sure that it’s clear to participants that there are no consequences to them withdrawing from the ...

  Last time, I began walking you through some of the sections of the REB application and giving you tips for completing them. This week, I will go through the more sections of the application. Next time I will wrap things up! Full disclosure: I am a member of the REB (2012-present). These are my personal opinions and following my advice does not guarantee any particular outcome during the review process. Participants sub-sections (Section 4.2b) explain what people have to “be” in order to participate (e.g., female student, under 30 years old, enrolled in a GNED, mother to at least 1 biological child). Your exclusion criteria (c) are the opposite, but you may not need to specify them unless there is a grey area (e.g., what if someone is currently pregnant but the child isn’t born yet- do they qualify for the study described above?) or if you have a reason to exclude certain categories (e.g., excluding adoptive mothers if you’re looking at something that requires that the person had...

  Another topic requested in the survey I sent out in December is how to fill out the REB application, so that’s the topic for today, but it’s too big a topic to approach in one post, so parts 2 and 3 will be in the next 2 editions! My first tip is to make sure you use the latest application form for research involving humans (you can find it either on the main page or on ICE ) and also use the templates which are available on ICE (e.g., consent form). It’s always a good idea to go to one of these locations to retrieve the most recent version of the forms as they are updated periodically. Also, for full disclosure, I am a member of the REB (2012-present). These are my personal opinions and following my advice does not guarantee any particular outcome during the review process. Now on the specific sections of the application. For Section 3.0, it seems fairly straightforward to enter dates, but it often requires revisions. Ensure that you give yourself enough time between the app...

  In December, I asked for your feedback via a survey. One of the comments in it requested information about the types of research projects that are the quickest and easiest to produce. The short answer to that is that projects requiring no new data collection (i.e., those which collect data through secondary use approval) will be the least time-consuming to produce. Here’s my rationale for this response and some ways to begin. With a secondary use of data project, you have already collected the information you need, so you won’t need to request volunteers to participate (which sometimes takes a long time). Additionally, in many cases, you won’t need to ask for permission with a consent form to use it. For example, in many cases, it would be more harmful to participants to be contacted by you to request they consent to you using their grades in your class (or impossible to do so if they have graduated and are no longer Durham College students). Finally, the REB application form fo...

  There are always risks when conducting research, though these are usually minimal (i.e., no greater than participants encounter in their everyday lives). Note, however, that the level of risk varies a little based on your group of participants. For example, students can expect very little danger in their daily lives, but if your participants are police officers of fire fighters, the threshold for minimal risk is actually increased because they do encounter significant risk in their daily lives. For example, there would be a lot more risk in asking a GAS or PHS student to run on a treadmill in extremely hot temperatures while measuring their performance on cognitive tasks, but it would be a more acceptable level of risk to ask trained firefighters to perform such a task as this is similar to what they do in their jobs. Neither of these examples are minimal risk studies, but I use the example to illustrate my point that risk is relative. Ok, now back on track to students! The...

  This topic was requested in the survey I sent out in December. Note: some of the information below was included in previous editions.  The first step to any research project is to complete the TCPS2 Core Certificate ( https://tcps2core.ca/ ) if you haven’t already. But the step of the research process that stumps people the most is probably the first one: finding an idea! An idea for a SoTL research project can come from anywhere. Think of a problem you face in the classroom- it could be related to the material (How can I teach this better?), student performance (Can I do something to help students improve their performance?), or other variable (Does assigning groups for projects reduce group conflicts?). Once you have your SoTL topic, formulate a prediction that you can test and then think about how you can test. Perhaps you want to compare 2 sections of the same course. Or you want to randomly assign students to various conditions within the same class. Now, you’re ready...

  Before we begin, a reminder that a research question is a specific, testable question that clearly identifies the variables of interest. It identifies the scope and goal of your research project. Last time, we looked at how to develop a research question from scratch. This time, I will outline some other places you can find inspiration for a research question. Your favourite journal article. Do you have a favourite journal article? Oh. It’s just me then? Okay, well…if you have ever read a journal article that you really liked, that’s a good place to start! Specifically, focus your reading on their discussion section for ideas. Most papers identify shortcomings of their research (e.g., “We couldn’t address this possible confounding variable, so we can’t provide a strong conclusion.”), gaps in the literature which still exist (e.g., “Although we showed that …it is still not clear whether….”), and/or directions for future research (“Building on this research, future studies should e...