Policy Statement About Anonymous or Identified Web Surveys (effective 3.1.08)

All web surveys, developed for research purposes, that are initiated at Bryn Mawr College by faculty, students and/or staff need to be reviewed and approved by the IRB before they are initiated. The Bryn Mawr College IRB adheres to the applicable federal definition of research as “any systematic investigation, including research development (pilot testing) designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.”

Also, all such surveys must be encrypted. This policy also applies to web surveys, initiated by faculty, students and/or staff who are not part of the Bryn Mawr College community, but wish to use faculty, students, and/or staff from the College as research participants.

The College will not provide faculty, students or staff outside of the Bryn Mawr College community access to email lists for recruitment and/or data collection until the Bryn Mawr College IRB has approved the research protocol.

An Internet Protocol (IP) address is a unique identifying number used to identify computers connected to the Internet. An IP address might be static (i.e., always refer to one institution’s server), dynamic (assigned upon connection), or pooled (a group of servers share one or more IP addresses). IP addresses may also change multiple times during the same connection – for example, the IP address of AOL users may change multiple times per minute. An IP address generally will represent either an institution (i.e., a university or large company) or an Internet Service Provider (i.e., AOL or an ISP serving one or more communities). Once the administration of the survey is fully completed, the IP address will be discarded. In the event Bryn Mawr College receives a subpoena to produce IP addresses and their associated responses, we would provide that information. It would be possible to identify the computer used to complete the survey. On the other hand, the administrators of this survey do not have the ability to identify the computer used during the collection of these data.