Postgraduate Taught Students' Dissertations (INF6000/INF6900)
Students undertaking dissertations on the MA/MSc programmes should initially meet with their proposed supervisors to discuss their proposal. The student should submit their outline proposal with a cover sheet by the deadline (usually early March). Students will be informed of their supervisor and the classification of risk for their dissertation as soon as possible after the Departmental Research Committee has met to allocate supervisors.
Dissertations that do not involve human participants or use human data do not require any ethics approval and can proceed at any time in consultation with your supervisor.
For all projects involving human participants, irrespective of the risk category below, you are expected to abide by the University's research ethics policy, e.g., gain informed consent where appropriate, anonymise data, etc., in the usual way, and this should be in consultation with the supervisor.
When the outline proposals are submitted in early March, the Departmental Research Ethics Administrator meets with the secretary of the University Research Ethics Committee (UREC) and they go through and classify all of the projects according to how risky they appear to be.
The three classes of risk for research involving human participants and data are:
- No risk
- Low risk
- Potentially high risk
1) No risk. These are primarily for projects that are testing out a system and do not appear to involve any risk to the participants or researcher. If your project has been classified as "No risk", you do not have to submit an ethics application, but you do need to abide by the ethics policy, as mentioned above.
2) Low risk. These are projects that while they do not deal with sensitive issues or vulnerable people, but may, for example, touch upon issues that may affect the well-being of participants or there may be factors that could affect their decision to participate. If your project has been classified as "Low-risk", you have to submit via email an ethics application to your supervisor, who will then review the ethics application and make a decision and will inform you of the outcome and/or any changes required/suggested. You can only commence your data collection once you have received approval from your supervisor.
3) Potentially high risk. These are projects that typically deal with sensitive issues, e.g., race/ethinicity, sexuality, religion, and/or involve potentially vulnerable people, e.g., anyone under the age of 18, prisoners, frail/seriously ill people, asylum seekers. If your project has been classified as "potentially high risk", your project will require full ethics approval, by your supervisor and another person, and will also be scrutinised by the Departmental Research Ethics Administrator. You will have to email your ethics application to the Research Ethics Administrator and he will arrange for the ethics review and notify you of the outcome and/or any changes required/suggested. You can only commence your data collection once you have received approval from him.
If you have any queries about this process, please contact the Departmental Research Ethics Administrator.