This is an issue our IRB has grappled with at Valdosta State.  Here, researchers cannot use official faculty, staff, and student mailing lists for participant recruitment, as those are only for "official" institutional business communication.   However, there is no prohibition against faculty, student, and external investigators accessing the public campus directory and emailing potential participants individually.  This policy comes from the campus-wide IT committee.  However, there is a current discussion about establishing additional mailing lists (optional subscription) that would allow exchange of non-official/personal business (selling cars and furniture, advertising apartment rentals, seeking roommates, announcing off campus events, and conceivably recruiting participants).

I have often thought that it would be a neat idea to establish a campus-wide participant pool.  Students could register with the pool at the beginning of the academic year (perhaps for a chance to win a book store gift certificate) and then would be contacted by different investigators at different times.  They could then decide on participation in a study on a case-by-case basis.  Faculty and staff could also sign up.  This would, in effect, be an expansion of the typical Psychology pools found on many campuses and, I believe, managed with commercial software designed for this purpose.

I don't see policy on use of campus email or other IT or non IT resources for participant recruitment (or the establishment of a campus participant pool) as a responsibility of the IRB.  As IRB Administrator, I assure that researchers propose recruitment methods that are allowable under institutional policy.  The IRB's role is then one of reviewing and approving the (allowable) recruitment methods proposed as they related to the total protocol and risk/benefit.

Barbara

Barbara H. Gray
Director of Sponsored Programs & Research Administration
IRB and IACUC Administrator
Valdosta State University

Email:  xxxxxx@valdosta.edu
Telephone:  229-333-7837
URL:  www.valdosta.edu/ospra

-----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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 Instructions on how to use the RESADM-L Mailing List, including
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