Recently our IRB was asked to limit the extent to which PIs can e-mail students for surveys, because of a concern about survey fatigue.  There are lots of surveys for Student Affairs that come through our IRB, and it appears the administration wants to prioritize those over faculty research or student research.  The IRB chair believes it is not the role of the IRB to police the use of mailing lists.  Do others have policies or practices for their IRBs concerning similar restrictions?  We are wondering what other schools do about this.

Note that when PIs from other institutions want to use our students as research subjects, we do not provide student e-mail addresses.  We direct the PI to advertise on our Portal, providing a link where students can opt in.  Internally, our faculty and students do the same thing, but administrators are able to e-mail all the students, blast-style, and sometimes PIs are able to get an OK from an administrator to use the blast e-mails.

Landy

----------------------------
Landy C. Johnson, MPA, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Economics and Geography
Director of Grant Development
Assumption College Provost Suite
500 Salisbury St., Worcester, MA 01609-1296
508-767-7666
xxxxxx@assumption.edu

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