DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY, RICE UNIVERSITY

PROCEDURE FOR TESTING SUBJECTS

• Subject allocation
• Conserving and supplementing the subject pool
• To instructors of undergraduate psychology courses

PROCEDURE FOR RECRUITING SUBJECTS

• Get certified
• Obtain approval
• Schedule subjects
• What instructors should tell their students
• For more information.
  

EXPERIMENTER RESPONSIBILITIES

• Show up
• Document informed consent
• Promptly assign credit
• Make the experience educational
• Rate of pay

SUBJECT RESPONSIBILITES

PROCEDURES FOR TESTING SUBJECTS

Research is the critical mission of all good psychology programs, both undergraduate and graduate, and the vast majority of such research involves the testing of human subjects. Our pool of subjects is therefore a critical resource. Use of this pool is a privilege, not a right, and procedures for testing subjects must be followed carefully. The cardinal rule is to treat people participating as subjects with courtesy and respect. They should emerge from the experiment in as good shape as when they entered, and a little more knowledgeable.

Subject allocation. Subject hours are allocated to faculty members. The following system does not guarantee the number of hours allocated, but it does work reasonably well:  Each faculty member is allocated 100 subject hours + 50 hours per supervised graduate student + 25 hours per supervised undergraduate student registered for an "Independent Research" or an "Advanced Topics" course involving subject testing.  The allocation procedure applies for just the first 12 weeks of the semester; after that, there are no limits for any eligible user. Faculty members should calculate their allocation and stick to it. If it appears that someone is overusing the subject pool, the Research Overseer will examine the case. Academics and researchers who are not regular members of the Department may request use of the subject pool.  Such requests must be made on a study-by-study or semester-by-semester basis, whichever is the shorter, and must be sponsored by a regular faculty member of the Department other than the Research Overseer.  The Research Overseer will consider the application in light of his or her judgment of the probable educational value of participation and of subject-hour availability.

The subject pool can be conserved and supplemented in the following ways:

• Recruit subjects from other sources (e.g., Houston Community College, University of Houston). People who have portable experiments are especially encouraged to pursue this option.
  
  
• Pay subjects. A lottery also works well.
  
  
• Do field studies or use archival data.
  
  
• Use the same subjects for multiple experiments (e.g., use the same subjects in a baseline condition for two studies).
  
  
• Give credit in half-hour increments rather than filling any extra time with borderline research.
  
  
• Collaborate with another experimenter to maximize time usage.

To instructors of undergraduate psychology courses. Students taking Psychology 101 are required to participate in 5 hours of experiments or to complete a time-comparable alternative project. Although experiment participation is the preferred option--both with regard to subject availability and, more importantly, the education of the students--the alternative must be offered. The students may, at the discretion of the Instructor, also participate in additional hours of experiments for extra credit. Instructors of other undergraduate classes are expected to add their classes to the subject pool. Students' participation as subjects can either be made part of the course requirement or provided as an option for extra credit. Ideally, instructors will use both options.  It is recommended that instructors require 3 hours and give extra credit for an additional 3 hours.  Instructors who elect to give students extra credit should develop appropriate grading schemes.  In the past, the guideline has been that students should receive 1% of the total possible points for the course as a whole for each hour of research participation up to a limit set by the instructor, but no student should be awarded more than 3% of the total possible points for extra credit. The extra credit points should be added to the students' scores after the final grade distribution for the course has been determined.  Details of assignments offered as an alternative to experiment participation must be spelled out in the course syllabus.

Get certified.  Before subjects can be tested in any experiment, everyone involved in the conduct of the experiment must be trained and certified in the protection of human research subjects.  Training can be obtained at:

http://osr.rice.edu/consent/procedures.cfm. 

A list of those who have successfully completed the training can be found at:

http://osr.rice.edu/consent/IRBList.cfm

Obtain approval. Approval for the conduct of any given experiment must be obtained from both (i) the Rice University Institutional Review Board (IRB) for the Protection of Human Subjects and (ii) the Department Research Overseer.

Application to the IRB should be made by downloading the appropriate form linked to below.

Protocol Form for Use of Human Subjects in Research

The form should be e-mailed to Michele Pratt, mpratt@rice.edu, as an attachment. Be sure to spell out, under Item 8, details regarding anonymity or confidentiality. All applications should be sponsored by a regular psychology faculty member, named on the application as the principal investigator. Applications must be renewed annually--normally a simple procedure initiated by a request from the Office of Sponsored Research.

Once IRB approval has been obtained, Department approval must be obtained from the Department’s Research Overseer.  This involves registering the experiment in the front part of the Book of Experiments, a fat white binder located in the mailroom.  The experiment number may be claimed merely by entering the experimenter’s name, with completion of the process being delayed for up to 48 hours, during which the experiment number can be used in preparing the consent and debriefing sheets.  The latter sheets should be placed at the back of the Book of Experiments.  Once registration is complete, inform the Research Overseer by email, who will consider it in short order—almost always within 24 hours, and usually much faster.  Under no circumstances may subjects be tested without Research Overseer approval.

Schedule subjects.  Soliciting subjects in classes is not allowed.  Rather, recruitment should be entirely by way of Experimetrix, as follows:

1. Upon approval, the Department Overseer will inform the Experimetrix Executrix (currently Shu Wang), who will supply a password for the experiment.  This will enable you to log on to http://experimetrix.com/Rice ; if desired, the password may be changed after logging on.  Click “experimenter.area” and enter the experiment number as the logon. 
   
   
2. Click “Getting Started” for instructions.  For the purpose of these instructions, “supervisor” refers to a regular Departmental faculty member and “experimenter” to whomever is to conduct the experiment.
   
   
3. The descriptions should be brief, and not designed to entice. Never use an exclamation point! The following two descriptions are recommended as models:
   
   
   • Evaluate applicants for college admission. Credit: 1 hour.
     
     
   • You will be viewing the computer monitor and making a response to the stimuli. Credit: 1 hour.
     
     
   Amount of credit should be stated exactly as in the two recommended examples. Never say "Get." Never say exactly how long the experiment takes (e.g., "Takes only 43.4 minutes!"). Just give the credit time.
   
   
4. After you have entered the experiment, be sure to click “View Schedule” and then “Display Experiment to Students”—otherwise the experiment will not be visible to would-be subjects. Assign credit by logging onto the experiment again and following the links. 

What instructors should tell their students. Students should be directed to http://experimetrix.com/Rice (or to the Departmental web page, where they should click on “Undergraduate Program” and then “Participation in Experiments”) and follow the instructions.  This page contains the “Subjects’ Rights and Responsibilities,” the experiment credit hour sheet, a list of frequently asked questions, and contact information for more help, as well as instructions for getting an account and signing up for experiments.

Repeatedly tell the students that, after earning credit, they must log onto their account and assign their credit to a specific course.   They should do so as soon as they are confident that they will complete (i.e., not drop) the course.  Failure to assign earned credit is by far the biggest source of problems with the Experimetrix system.

For more information. Contact the Experimetrix Executrix (sw4317@rice.edu). 

Documentation for experimenters is available at http://experimetrix.com/MomentumEdoc.htm.

A list of all of Momentum's features is available at http://www.experimetrix.com/featuredetails.htm.

EXPERIMENTER RESPONSIBILITIES

Show up for the experiment.If the experimenter is not at the agreed location at the stated time, the posted credit must be awarded to the subject and charged to the experimenter's subject account. If the time or the location of the experiment changes, or if the session is canceled for some reason, subjects must be informed beforehand. If that is not possible, someone should be present at the location to inform of the change in venue or to issue credits. If the subjects show up and for some reason are not used, then either the session should be re-scheduled (if the subject is willing) or the subjects should be given the posted credit.

Document informed consent. Subjects must be informed in general terms about the procedure and must consent. If the IRB has found the experiment to be exempt from the need for further review, a record of informed consent is discretionary; otherwise, written informed consent must be documented. In this case, the informed consent form must be submitted to the Overseer when Department approval is sought. Exceptions to the requirement for written informed consent for nonexempt research are possible in certain narrowly defined circumstances, but in all cases approval by both the chair of the IRB (currently Mark Jenkins, via Michele Pratt) and the Department Overseer is essential.  Informed consent should be signed in duplicate, with one copy being given to the subject and one retained by the experimenter.  The experimenter’s copies should be stored in a neat and orderly way in the sponsoring lab for at least 3 years beyond completion of the research.  These records should be available for inspection by the Department Overseer, the IRB, and the relevant federal authorities.  The head of the lab (i.e., the sponsoring faculty member) is ultimately responsible for maintenance of these records.  More generally, experimenters must be sure that their research does not endanger the welfare of subjects. The APA guidelines concerning informed consent, confidentiality, and subjects' right to privacy are helpful in these matters. Any experimenter who uses coercion to ensure that a subject remains in an experiment will be subject to severe disciplinary action. All subjects must be adequately informed by the experimenter of the procedures to be followed. Any discomforts, risks, as well as benefits, should be described. Risks must be well-defined in terms understandable to the subjects. A sample consent form is provided in .doc format and in .pdf format.

Promptly assign credit. Experimenters must assign credit via Experimentrix as soon as possible after each subject’s participation.  Any subject not credited within 24 hours will be asked to report the matter to both the experimenter and the Overseer.  Students are encouraged to keep their own personal record of experiment participation (click here for the form). Following completion of an experimental session, the experimenter should sign these Record of Experiment Participation forms and check that the experiment number, the number of credit hours, and the date are correct; if these are not filled in, be sure to fill them in for the student. Experimenters must have extra copies of the Record of Experiment Participation forms available in case students forget theirs. Students will be allowed to staple these forms together to create a packet of records for their courses. For administrative purposes, undergraduate research assistants are not considered experimenters and when signing a subject's Record of Experiment Participation sheet must write in the name of the supervising experimenter.

Make the experience educational. Experimenters must make participation in their study a learning experience. As all trained psychologists are aware, mere participation as subjects is informative and indeed an essential ingredient of an adequate undergraduate program. But in addition, each subject should be given a written account of the purpose of various aspects of the study, the hypothesis (or hypotheses) being evaluated, and the possible application of the results. This account need not be given immediately after participation if the experimenter feels that doing so will affect the responses of later subjects. But it must be provided as soon as possible after the experiment is completed or at the end of the semester, whichever is sooner.  A sample description is provided in .doc format and in .pdf format.

Rate of pay. For paid subjects, the basic rate of pay is $8.00 per hour, to be paid in 1/2 hour increments (i.e., $4.00 for every 1/2 hour of participation, rounding up). Paid subjects have the same rights as credited subjects.