4. Checking consents and collecting data

Checking consents

After your IRB application or ethics board approval is approved, the next step is to begin recruiting participants. Follow the guidelines in your research protocol.

As you gather data, you must check the consents of your research participants. Having a system to check who has consented is important for ensuring ethical data collection.

Creating a spreadsheet with consenting participants’ names can be helpful for organizing the process. The screenshot below shows an example of a spreadsheet similar to what we use. In this spreadsheet, each sheet includes consented students from a particular instructor that are included in our corpus. For convenience, multiple sections are recorded in the same spreadsheet.

(Note: this data is not real and only used here for demonstration purposes.)

You can use the same type of process to record the names of participants who opt out of your study, if that is your approach. Your IRB or ethics board approval may specify that you keep records of consent and consent forms in a location separate from data. Ensure you follow these requirements.

Collecting data

Once you have collected consent forms and recorded information about consented participants in a spreadsheet, you can start collecting data. There are different ways to collect this data.

You can collect data directly from participants through a digital form such as Qualtrics or JotForm. However, you may not get the same level of participation this way, particularly if you do not have incentives for participation.

A more effective way of collecting data can be to work with instructors or other stakeholders who can provide access to student/participant texts. To collect data for the Crow corpus, we contact instructors at the end of the semester with a list of consented students from their class. To make sure that there is no conflict of interest for the instructors, you can delay providing instructors information about consented students after final grades have been submitted. That way, students’ decision to participate in your research will not influence their grades.

In the next two sections, we describe two options that we have found helpful to offer instructors when collecting student data.

Share access to LMS or other website

In order to reduce the burden on instructors, you can ask them to share access to their learning management systems (LMS), such as D2L (Brightspace), BlackBoard, Canvas, or another web platform where texts are stored. That way, instructors or other stakeholders do not have to spend time downloading the texts then sharing them with you.

Once you have access to the LMS, you can use the consented participants spreadsheet that you created previously to select and download only the texts from the consented participants. Alternatively, you can batch download all student texts from a given instructors’ course for a given assignment or draft. However, you will then need to delete all texts from non-consented students.

Tip: If you are directly collecting texts from an LMS, you may want to contact your IT office to check if you could automatically scrape your LMS. The key here is whether an application programming interface (API), which allows the automatic download of data, is available. We unfortunately have not been able to use this method for our own data collection at University of Arizona, since D2L, our learning management system, does not have an API. However, this is an option for other LMS.

After you have downloaded the texts, you can let instructors involved know they can revoke the access they granted to you.

Submit to a secure drive

Sometimes instructors or other collaborators might not want to share access to their LMS, or prefer to be more actively engaged in the process of data collection. In this case, you can invite them to submit the consented participants’ texts to a secure drive.

We use Box for this purpose because it is approved by our IRB. You should check with your IRB or ethics board to make sure where they prefer you store identifiable student data. Again, this location may be different than the location you store other data and/or your corpus.