Psychology

Your use of the Department’s Participant Pool is a privilege, and with that privilege comes certain responsibilities. Please note that the pool is only available to Carleton Psychology Department faculty and current Carleton Psychology students.

Trust: Most students enter the psychological research setting with some level of trust in the experimenter. Please don’t disappoint students’ expectations. Even if your study is about serial memory schemata, you are dealing with real people. Be sensitive to their needs and concerns.

Courtesy: Please treat subjects with the same courtesy you would expect. These people are helping you with your research project and deserve your gratitude. If you treat them badly, not only might your data be contaminated, but you may also discredit the department and the field.

Privacy: Subjects in research have every right to expect that their information will be kept confidential. This means that you cannot talk about individual subjects with your colleagues in such a manner that you identify them. Please make sure that papers from your research are kept in secure places (like locked rooms) so that no one could accidentally discover a subject’s identity.

Informed Consent: Informed consent of participants is a central criterion for conducting ethical research. Subjects must know enough about your study so that they can make an informed decision about whether they want to participate or not. Informed consent includes mentioning all of the following things to subjects before they sign the informed consent form:

• Identify any sponsors of your research (such as the National Science Foundation or the Psychology Department Research Fund).
• Describe the purpose of your study in language that the layperson can understand.
• Mention how long the person will need to take to complete your study.
• Identify in language the layperson can understand any procedures or manipulations so that they can determine if they are willing to undergo them. Give the subject all the information you can without influencing their responses in your study. If you must deceive subjects about the purpose or procedures of your study, make certain that you have considered non-deceptive options and identified them to the IRB Committee.
• Identify any potential risks subjects may face from participation.
• Assure subjects that their data will be held in strict confidentiality.

Educational Debriefing: You will also need to compose a written explanation of your study, which you will give to subjects upon completion of their participation. The statement must explain the study to the participant in a way that is engaging, understandable, and reasonably comprehensive. Most statements will be about one single spaced page of text and will contain some suggestions for further reading.

If you are interested in recruiting participants through the Psychology website please fill out the form below.

Important: Before you submit your application you will need:

• IRB approval
• to have a room reserved
• to be ready to run participants on the date you indicate as your start date.
• a way for participants to sign up for your study. See this example of a google doc used for scheduling. Make sure the Google doc is available to those with a link and open for others to edit.