Many areas of psychological research rely on collecting data from human participants. It is essential that any research carried out in the department has satisfied ethical requirements and all such work carried out in the department must be approved by the Departmental Ethics Committee. The following information has most relevance for students seeking ethical approval for project work.
You will not be able to start data collection on your project unless and until you have ethical approval from the relevant university ethics committee.
For students on taught courses there are, essentially, three kinds of routes to gaining ethical approval :-
In some cases it is possible to run EEG/tDCS studies in the department even though, typically, these are carried out in YNiC. If you are intending to do this then you need to follow the instructions contained on this page.
As will become clear, special cases are those that involve :-
The committee will closely scrutinise these case and (in cases 1 and 2) you will need to submit additional consent and/or information forms when you submit your application.
Other cases that are likely to exercise the committee (the list is not exhaustive) are :-
To expedite the process and to help the committee concentrate on the sensitive cases you should alert the committee to anything that you take to be a sensitive issue.
On your application form, you (and your supervisor) are invited to draw the attention of the committee to your case if you think it raises sensitive issues.
Applications are processed at fixed times throughout the year. You will be provided with key dates when these become available and you will be notified of the committee's decisions as soon as possible after the committee has considered all the relevant applications.
To be clear you cannot start data collection unless and until you have the requisite ethical approval.
A link to the current Ethical guidance can be found here.
The current template for UG ethics approval and for students on taught post-graduate courses can be downloaded from **here**
Links to external ethics guidance can be found here for the BPS and for the ESRC.
Finally a link to the university's own guidance can be found here.
A brisk (ppt) intro to Ethics 101 can be found here.
Special cases
It may well be possible to provide early ethical approval for undergraduate applications if some of the project work must take place over the summer period. If this is the case, then it is important to contact your superviosr as soon as possible and make sure that the correct forms are filled in, signed and submitted.