Collaborative Research: Incubation Project for Empirical Evidence to Improve Informed Consent in the Social Sciences

About This Grant

Informed consent is a cornerstone of research ethics. However, standard consent procedures often fail to ensure participants understand the content and consequences of their participation in research. This project will extend scientific understanding of informed consent in the social and behavioral sciences by probing participant comprehension of data sharing options and preferences for confidentiality. These issue areas have grown in importance as researchers aim to conduct work that is both ethical and transparent. This project involves three related activities. First, the development of a scoping review of past research on the topic. Second, an expert workshop to discuss current practices that aim to enhance ethical consent and research trade-offs in consent design decisions. And third, the collection of original data through focus groups with researchers who seek to obtain consent for surveys, as well as interviews with research participants. Findings from this project will inform researcher decision-making with respect to informed consent design choices and contribute to evidence-based recommendations about how to improve standard practices for obtaining consent. Participation in research is essential for the progress of the social and behavioral sciences, and ensuring genuinely informed consent is key to the ethical treatment of participants. This project seeks to advance scientific understanding of informed consent, focusing on two key issues. First, the project assesses how participants understand confidentiality and data sharing in the informed consent process. Second, it evaluates how participants behave when introduced to various types of content included in the consent script and different modes of obtaining consent. The project begins with a scoping review of prior research on this topic and convening a workshop of experts to identify which issues are most pressing. These activities will inform subsequent original data collection in the United States and abroad. Focus groups will collect enumerator perspectives and recommendations on informed consent processes and gather specific feedback on the informed consent scripts used in cognitive probing interviews. The cognitive interviews will examine how research participants understand and react to content, language, or delivery variations in the informed consent process. This project is funded through the ER2 program by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.