Situation
There are many committees at State University. In the attempt to gather relevant information to proceed with their various charges, many of the committees decide to send out short, informal surveys to faculty, staff or students to get a sense of what they think. These surveys appear in the campus mailboxes of target population. Professor Timothy Martindale is on one of these Committees that has taken up the issue of the perceptions of and responses of faculty to tenure reviews. The committee sent surveys to all faculty who received tenure in the last academic year. At some point, in looking over the returned surveys, Professor Martindale decides that the findings are both important and useful for understanding the current crisis of higher education. He proceeds to write up and article, based on these data, for one of the higher education journals.
Questions
- Are these surveys subject to review by human subjects committees?
- Do these procedures sufficiently protect human subjects?
Discussion
This case involves two issues — one of ethics and one of best practices. First, as soon as Professor Martindale decides that the committee’s work may provide data for research purposes, then he should step back and reexamine the ethical issues in doing this research. At this point, all research data are subject to institutional review board approval. Under what conditions were the data collected? For example, what were the targeted faculty told about the use of these data? Were they told that this would be used for internal purposes only? If so, then Professor Martindale is obligated to ascribe to standards for the protection of human subjects, and most likely, under current regulations, recontact respondents and ask permission to use the data for other purposes. There is often the additional issue of the quality of the data in these informal surveys. Unless the surveys are not anonymous, they are generally in line with policies to collect institutional information. The real problems here generally revolve around how the surveys were constructed. Often these are put together quickly by committees who are not or do not consult individuals with any training or survey expertise. The sheer number of them can be annoying and may call for an institutional clearinghouse. Further, the response rates in such efforts are generally so low that the data are of poor quality and not useful, another factor rarely considered in many of these efforts.
