Human Participant Research Guidance

If your research includes human participants, please note the following guidelines.

Authors must have received consent from participants for the study itself and for publishing the study. We expect that many of our authors will have completed the first part of this requirement. But, as many of these authors completed their study for a course assignment, it is unlikely that they have finished the second. If you have completed your study with participant consent, please contact your participants and make sure you have their consent to publish the findings.

Note: Food-Fueled reserves the right to request copies of consent agreements and may reject or retract articles that cannot provide evidence of human participant consent.

For authors who are new to research with human participants, a nice introduction on some basics, written by Bethany Brookshire, can be found here.

Some extra notes of guidance:

Authors need to ensure that data is anonymized. That is, a reader should not be able to intuit a participant’s identity from the answers and demographic data given.

Questions, and information garnered from answers, should not be embarrassing or damaging to the participant. As an extreme example of this, data should not indicate illegal activities by participants.

Participation in the research should not impose more than minimal risk to the human participants. That is, their exposure to risk should not be increased as a result of taking part in the study.

If this study was performed as part of faculty-led research, it is likely that the research advisor has gotten approval from an Internal Review Board for the details of the study and is the holder of the participant consent forms. We strongly urge our student authors to become familiar with the details of the IRB protocols governing their research.