Dear OB Colleagues,
I've been following this stream with interest as I have experienced similar problems myself. I have used the Study Response database as a way of generating a large general pool of employees across organisations that can help me assess the psychometric properties of new tools. The standard approach with this database is to offer incentives to encourage participation. We offered a lottery for $50 Amazon vouchers with participants having something like a 4% chance of winning one. This got response rates up to about 25%. Without it, I fear we'd have got a very poor response.
We ran this approach by our Ethics Committee who were initially unsure about it. Once we showed that it was common practice with this database and many top journals had published studies using the Study Response database with incentives, they yielded and gave us the go ahead. Their questioning seemed perfectly reasonable and it ensured that we considered the risks. We ran several such studies and never experienced any difficulties, except that we had to filter out about a hundred responses (5%?) who clearly didn't take the survey seriously and just wanted to get into the lottery (e.g. incomplete surveys or answering the same answer all the way through or obvious patterns in the responses). Fortunately, the Study Response system allows us to remove such people from the lottery draw (sorry, this is sounding a bit like an advert for Study Response).
I came away from this experience concluding that we need better systems and processes to spot rogue responses; people who don't respond to the questionnaires diligently and who just put something down to qualify for the draw. I couldn't spot people darting through putting random answers in and suspect it reduces correlations and distorts factor analyses. I'm unclear how a big a problem this is, but it does seem to be a problem.
In going through this process, I became more concerned about a related 'incentive': the offer of credit points for recruiting research participants (both self and others). This seems to be common practice and justified on the grounds that it encourages involvement with the research process. But to me, this is coercive and often invasive (when people have to complete personality questionnaires etc.). In addition, it seems wrong to me to give credit for learning based on students making researcher's lives easier. I know that most of these processes have ways in which students can opt out by having them do something else instead, but only the strongest characters are likely to avail themselves of such options.
Jon
Jon Billsberry
Professor of Organisational Behaviour
Coventry University
Chair-Elect, Management Education and Development (MED), Academy of Management
Chair, Organisational Psychology Special Interest Group, British Academy of Management
Associate Editor, Journal of Management Education
Faculty of Business, Environment and Society,
Coventry University, Priory Street, Coventry, West Midlands CV1 5FB
E:
j.billsberry@coventry.ac.uk
W:
www.jonbillsberry.co.uk
DL: 02476 888412
M: 07974 984556
________________________________
From: Gayle Baugh [mailto:
gbaugh@UWF.EDU]
Sent: Tue 24/08/2010 19:02
To:
OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: Re: [OB-LIST] Lucky Draws and Ethics Review
Dear OB Colleagues:
I've been reading with interest the discussion about a lottery as an incentive for participation in research. One of the things that we often don't remember is that IRBs were developed in large part for medical research. In many types of medical research, where there is risk, sometimes serious risk, involved, incentives are not permitted because they would be coercive. Individuals can be reimbursed for expenses, but anything beyond "normal" expenses would be considered something akin to "bribing" individuals to participate in the research. Thus, individuals with more difficult economic circumstances would be more willing to assume risk, whereas the benefit is gained more generally. This situation would not be acceptable to an IRB or, more generally, to a society.
Our types of research simply do not expose individuals to the same types of risk. Thus, most IRBs would not consider the type of incentive that you are suggesting, Angeline, as inappropriate. Perhaps if you asked for a face-to-face meeting with your IRB and discussed with them WHY there is such a strong prohibition against incentives, you might find that there is some latitude. I think that sometimes people who serve on IRBs forget why the "rules" are in place and look only at the "rules." And many of those "rules" are self-imposed rather than being imposed by an external body. So discussion might help you to reach an understanding about what you are trying to accomplish.
Hope that this response helps. -- Gayle
Gayle Baugh
Associate Professor
Co-Editor, Research in Careers Series
published by Information Age Publishing
Associate Editor, Group & Organization
Management
Department of Management & MIS
University of West Florida
11000 University Parkway
Pensacola, Florida 32514-5752
(850) 474-2206 (Office)
(850) 474-2314 (FAX)
gbaugh@uwf.edu
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