INFORMED CONSENT (SUNY-OW)
Title of research: Better understanding our students’ perception and beliefs about the field of psychology.
Who is conducting the study: Drs. B. Runi Mukherji and Erik Benau are conducting this study. Drs. Mukherji and Benau are both full time faculty in the psychology department,.
Purpose of Study: We want to better understand what students believe about the field of psychology. We also want to know more about the goals and aims of our students both during and after their undergraduate experience at Old Westbury.
Eligibility: To participate in this study, you must currently be enrolled in a psychology course at SUNY Old Westbury.
What you will be asked to do in the study: We would like you to complete some surveys about your attitudes and beliefs about psychology. The questions will ask if you believe psychology to be more of a science or more of a humanity, what your goals are within the field of psychology, your attitudes toward statistics and math, and what you would like to do when you graduate from SUNY OW.
Confidentiality: Your responses to the survey will be confidential. No identifying information (such as your name) will be collected about you, and data will not be shared with anyone outside of the research team. You will not be required to write any identifying information on the survey. The questionnaire and the informed consent will be kept separately. You will be assigned a unique code number that will be used for all research data. Your responses to the survey are voluntary, will be kept confidential, will not become part of your academic record, and the data will be reported in as a group with statistics.
On occasion, we may be interested in some of our respondents’ attitudes about how we can improve our instruction in this department and may want to contact you for more information.
There is one portion of this survey that is completely optional where we will ask if you would like to participate in follow-up studies. In this portion, you may provide your contact information, but this is completely optional. You will still earn full credit even if you do not provide this information. Any data analysis or publication that comes from these data will not include this information. We will delete your contact information from any dataset that we use with our team, and we will never publish your name or contact information in any format or setting.
Risks: There are no major risks in this study. You may experience slight discomfort when responding to some survey questions. Additionally, although we will take every possible step to protect your identity and responses, there is the possible risk of intrusion by outside agents (i.e., hacking) whenever information is shared over the internet.
Benefits: Although you will not directly benefit from taking part in this research study, we hope society will benefit from the knowledge gained.
