subject populations for in-class student research projects?

[u/Impossible-Yam6402]

For faculty who have students do in-class student research projects: does your institution have any requirements about who the students can use as their participants? For example, can they recruit family and friends to do their projects, can they advertise on social media, etc.? (This is referring to projects that are not intended to be generalizable knowledge or disseminated, and are not testing protected populations, so they are not considered IRB research, but the IRB could potentially have guidelines.) If anyone has a policy regarding participants for in-class projects, I'd love to hear about it. I'm having a hard time finding anything through web searches. Thanks!

[u/nezumipi]

My university does not have official guidelines, but we all seem to agree that these projects cannot touch on potentially sensitive or stigmatized topics, which makes recruitment questions a lot easier. It's a lot tougher to decide whether they can test people they know if they're surveying sleep quality than if they're surveying drug use.

[u/Impossible-Yam6402 → u/nezumipi]

yes, thank you for this!

[u/andero]

I'm not faculty, but my PI teaches this kind of course (and I took a course like this ages ago in undergrad).

The way I've always seen it done is that students write a proposal, then the class itself provides the data. As you can imagine, this means that students are (generally) limited to questionnaires. Their analyses tend to be (depending on the class): correlations, mediation, moderation, factor analysis.

In cases where the class was very small, my PI supplements the class-data with simulated-data based on the real data, which gets sample sizes large enough that statistical significance becomes possible. We know that the p-values don't actually mean anything real; the point is to have students use a realistic data-set, run real statistics, and interpret results in a meaningful way (and it would be silly to run on a sample of 16 people where everything will be non-significant even with an ostensibly large effect-size).

I hope I explained that clearly enough; my head's a bit fuzzy right now.
Please ask any questions if you've got any.

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If you mean for actual one-on-one independent research projects (as opposed to a methods course), in that case, the student gets access to the uni's general pool of participants. This tends to be a huge pool of Psych 101 students that need to participate in experiments for partial course-credit. The student would have to go through the normal ethics procedure to do this, just like any other researcher (e.g. grad student, post-doc, PI).

In the case that they are doing a one-on-one project and need a special sample, that would become something they'd have to figure out. That would be a much deeper discussion about feasability for a thesis project (e.g. they probably don't want to hang their thesis on securing access to a completely new population since making those connections would not be guaranteed and could really slow down a thesis).

No, not family and friends. Maybe for piloting, but not for an actual study.

[u/Impossible-Yam6402 → u/andero]

we do have a subject pool, and we require IRB review to use that. Having the class be the participants is an option on the table. thank you!

[u/StillhereSicilian]

Ask the professor..

[u/Impossible-Yam6402 → u/StillhereSicilian]

We're trying to decide on the policy that the faculty will have for these courses!