Beyond the written words of informed consent: What participants would like to know about research

Abstract

Informing the participants about the research is an essential part of the activities planned and accomplished in research projects in any field, including psychological sciences. Research teams, scientific associations, and universities have increasingly equipped themselves with tools (the informed consent) that help accomplish this activity. Drawing on three different qualitative studies, we focus our analysis on both the information found in the consent sheets concerning the study aims and procedures and the questions raised by participants on the same topics while talking with the researcher. Considering informed consents as cultural artifacts, we discuss the importance of designing them in such a way that would make them more sensitive to the participants’ information demands, and not only to the researchers’ community needs.

Keywords::

• informed consent
• participants’ information needs
• qualitative studies
• researcher–participant interaction

Acknowledgement

The first study described in this work was supported by the Sloan Foundation [2001–2010; Project title: Everyday Lives of Families; Project Director: Elinor Ochs].

Notes

^1. The families were recruited by means of contacts that the researchers established with few schools in Rome and, particularly, with one particular teacher working in a middle-school, who was an acquaintance of the researchers and mediated some of the preliminary information regarding the researchers' identity and curriculum. The families who expressed this teacher preliminary interest in the project were contacted to schedule an appointment with two researchers of the team.