Hi there
We have been doing evaluation of our SMS shows and projects for many years, collecting (anonymous) opinions from our audiences, and using those to inform good practice and sometimes report to sponsors on changes to attitudes or knowledge.
What we haven’t done much of (but would like to) is turn these reports into more academic publications for peer-reviewed journals so we can share out best practice.
With my part-time role as Lecturer at Cardiff Uni I finally have a route to doing some more academic work but I am slightly horrified to discover that I think that none of the evaluation work we have done so far could be used in academic publications, because we have not sought specific parental consent from each student who filled in opinions or responded to our questionnaires.
So far, all of the ethics forms I have looked at for university research state that parental consent for minors must be gained before any research involving children can be done.
My question is, does this invalidate (almost) all the evaluation done by practitioners in our sector? Or have I somehow missed a major thing and everyone else is getting schools to fill out parental consent forms before asking any under age audiences to evaluate their activity for them?
I should point out that apart from age and gender we have never kept personal data, or be able to identify an individual on the work we have done so far.
I was really hoping though that my ’scholarship’ role would allow me to do some more rigorous academic writing using this data. But is that not the case?
Any advice much appreciated? How is this handled in communal evaluation places like the ‘Collective memory’ project?
Best wishes
Wendy
PS Anyone going to ECSITE who wants to chat more, give me a shout as I’ll be there for the first time in years!
My usual working days are Monday, Thursday and Friday.
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Wendy Sadler RSA, MSc
Director
science|made|simple
02920 876 884
science made simple | 14-17 The Parade | Cardiff | CF24 3AA
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