Hi, Landy,

I heard at a workshop on internet research that larger institutions have a committee which oversees who can contact students for survey purposes.  The approval then is given by two committees: the IRB for ethical concerns and another committee which acts as gatekeeper to the student email system.

Hope that helps.  I agree that it should not be the IRB's role to determine who has permission to access all students via email.

Cathy

-----Original Message-----
From: Research Administration List [mailto:xxxxxx@lists.healthresearch.org] On Behalf Of Johnson, Landy (Director of Grant Development)
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2013 11:23 AM
To: xxxxxx@lists.healthresearch.org
Subject: [RESADM-L] IRB and Student E-mail

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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