As part of my psychology coursework, I am asking a questionaire. Do I need to still ask parent's permission for a child(under 16) to answer the questionaire?

Thanks,

Ceri

I'm not a psychologist by any means, but I suppose it would depend on the subject of the questionnaire to whether you would need parents permission

Kflute- just sent you a PM

When we did our questionnaires for Psychology a few weeks back, we weren't allowed to ask under 16s at all, as it doesn't fit with the ethics...or something like that.....i'm not sure if that applies to everyone though??

sorry, not much help probably just confusing everyone now!! sorry!!!

xoxox

I would play safe on this one and say yes, you need parental permission. It is an interesting issue you can discuss when you look at ethical considerations.

(I used to teach A level Psychology.)

I think it would distort the results if parents got involved as the subjects may be biased toward parental-acceptable answers. When magazines and institutions survey 16s and under they always respect anonymity. Even then, designing the questions is the difficult part to avoid traps, and the surveys usually make many assumptions. Marketing people are well ahead of psychologists in question design.


b

Parental consent does not mean parents would have access to the responses, although they would need to have enough information to know what they were consenting to. This would also lead to interesting discussion points about the nature of 'informed consent'.

Incidentally, participants in psychology experiments are now called that: 'subjects' hasn't been used for the last 5 years or so, although you will still find the term in older text books and in research papers published in the last century.

But I hadn't meant to raise a terminology issue! You seem to know what I meant all the same.

I was hypothesising that the results from 'participants' who know that their parents consented MAY be different from those when the parents were oblivious. It's another assumption that has to be noted. Discussion, possible, but it really needs a control and that usually means a large sample. Also, sampling from ones friends or same school will give different results.

Thanks for your replies. I'll not question under 16's (so that means my friend you really wants to answer the questionaire won't be able to until April!), so I don't make any muck-ups with the ethics.

Thanks Ceri