Institutional Review Board
All research studies that involve human subjects or responses from humans must have approval from the Virginia Tech’s Institutional Review Board.
You need to go to the VT IRB site to learn about the process, get the necessary training, and download the required forms.
It is essential that any researcher who plans to gather data from human subjects submit the proposed research for approval by the IRB. Not doing so may leave you liable.
NOTES:
- If you plan to use SurveyMonkey for an electronic survey, be sure to include in your IRB application that you will have SurveyMonkey "disable the SSL" before data collection. In this way, the results you get will be truly anonymous and there will be no record kept of respondents’ IP addresses. Please note that this will cost an additional $9.95 per month.
- Also, for a secure connection, login to SurveyMonkey using https://www.surveymonkey.com/. The problem with entering your password on the public page (http://) and then going to a secure page (https://) is that you are left vulnerable to a malicious attack called the "man-in-the-middle" which could be used to gain your identity and password.
Additional VT sites you may want to visit as you plan your research:
