Specification: Human Research Ethics Application

Specification: Human Research Ethics Application

For your own research that you will ultimately undertake in the project course CIS8501 Applied Information Systems Research Project you will quite likely have to gain ethical clearance from the University. Most research in information systems involves humans so you will need to address relevant ethical matters. Even if ethical clearance is not required for the project you undertake, it will be a valuable learning experience for you to do this assignment because at some stage you will almost certainly need to gain ethical clearance for a project that you undertake.

As forecast earlier in the semester, your second assignment involves addressing ethical clearance requirements. The USQ website for relevant information and forms about research involving humans is here. This website links off to another website here where you will find forms for Human Research Ethics Application (Word document) and guidance about developing participant information sheets and consent forms as well as questionnaire, interview and focus group information sheets.

You should have already familiarized yourself with all the documents on the websites above and are now ready to complete the rest of this assignment.

Your task now is to take an existing research article and to present completed ethical clearance documents as if the research study had been your own and had been completed while you were a student at USQ. In filling in the Human Research Ethics Application form, section 1.1 is your details, you are the “Chief investigator”. In section 1.2 your “Supervisor” is Professor Mark Toleman. Section 1.3 will remain blank because you are the only investigator.

As previously advised, we said that two weeks before the assignment due date we would provide you with the actual research article on which you will base your assignment. The research article is one of those that you have been required to obtain and read during this course.

Adipat, B, Zhang, D & Zhou, L 2011, ‘The effects of tree-based presentation adaptation on mobile web browsing’, MIS Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 99-121.

You should assume that this study reported in this research article was undertaken at USQ so participants are assumed to be USQ students. In terms of the word count for any responses to questions on the Human Research Ethics Application form, some textboxes indicate the maximum, e.g. 300 words for textboxes 3.2 and 3.5. Other textboxes (e.g. 4.1) do not specify word count but you can assume that no more than 300 words would be needed in any of these.

Your task is to fill in the Human Research Ethics Application form to the best of your ability given the details available in the research article as well as using your own common-sense where the research article is unclear or not forthcoming in terms of an answer (e.g. section 7 will need you to consider appropriate sensible responses).

You are also required to provide other relevant documents such as guidance about developing participant information sheets and consent forms as well as experimental protocol, questionnaire, interview and focus group information sheets, if appropriate.

In terms of marking criteria, marks will be allocated to the various sections of the Human Research Ethics Application form as well to the other relevant documents, as appropriate.

Please note, you will not actually be submitting your documents for ethical clearance by the USQ Human Ethics Committee. Please do not send your documents to the ethics email address in the Human Research Ethics Application form. The documents will be uploaded to the assignment submission system and evaluated as part of this assignment only. I repeat, please do not send your documents to the ethics email address in the Human Research Ethics Application form.