Autumn always seems to be quite packed and fast paced. This year our course was organising a December work in progress show, which limited my time in preparing documents in advance. So for this reason, and due to the fact that time was running out, I had to do my actions and data gathering before creating my consent forms. My tutor mentioned I could send a retroactive consent, which seemed like a good solution.
I took verbal consent from the participants explaining what I would be doing as well as telling them that I would be sending a consent form at a later date and that they could withdraw at any point.
One dilemma I came across was that our course is very small, it would be easy to identify some staff members if any data was online even if it was anonymous. In the BREA guidelines this is called identification by association (BERA, 2024), so I added this to the information sheet making participants aware of this.
The other dilemma I faced was the consent and confidentiality itself. I created an online questionnaire for students to feedback their thoughts on the activities, there was an option to make their names anonymous when answering this so I selected this option. As the days went on, one student answered the questionnaire, I thought if I wanted to use their responses would I need to send a consent form? But I don’t know who to send it to because the form was anonymous! I could send it to everyone asking for the person that filled out the form to fill it out, but then that would reveal their identity to me! And they might have filled it out initially because of that anonymity. I found a source online that explained, if data collected from humans is fully anonymised you don’t need consent to share this, but you should inform your participants how the data will be used (Darby, 2025).
This made sense, so I send through my information sheet to all the participants, and as more people answered the questionnaire, it made it less likely for me to know who they were, I decided to also send through the consent form just to be extra safe in the matter. I think looking back, the idea of the retroactive consent seemed like a time saver but given more preparation time, sending something through before the activities and interviews would be less painful in the future. This is something to feedback to students, most of them now have copies of consent forms which they can also edit and use for their own research. I made two versions of the consent form, for the student version I didn’t add my phone number and replaced it with an alternative email address.
References:
BERA (2024) Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research. London: Available at: https://www.bera.ac.uk/publication/ethical-guidelines-for-educational-research-fifth-edition-2024 (Accessed: 9 January 2025)
(Darby, 2025)
Darby, R. (2025) Research ethics and data protection. Available at: https://www.reading.ac.uk/research-services/research-data-management/data-management-planning/research-ethics-and-data-protection (Accessed: 9 January 2025).