Web Surveys

All web surveys, developed for research purposes, that are initiated at Bryn Mawr College by Bryn Mawr faculty, students, and/or staff or researchers who are faculty, students and/or staff from other institutions 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.”

All Web surveys initiated by members of the Bryn Mawr College community or distributed to members of the College community must adhere to the following security conditions:

• The Web based survey system must employ SSL encryption of all transmissions between the respondents and the survey servers.
• The survey results must be secured behind a password protected account with access limited to the study researchers and system administrators.
• The survey system service provider must have a privacy policy that prevents employees of the service provider from accessing survey results without permission granted by the account holder.
• All downloads of data from the survey system must employ SSL encryption for the transmission.

The College has a licensing agreement with Qualtrics.com that grants any member of the community (faculty, staff, and students) an account upon request. Qualtrics.com has the ability to meet the security conditions outlined above. If you are proposing to use web survey software other than Qualtrics, please include a full description of the software’s security protections that need to meet the conditions described in the bulleted section above. At this time, Google Forms does not meet the College’s security measures. It is the researcher’s responsibility to ensure these conditions are being met. Additional security measures may be required depending on the nature and sensitivity of the data being collected.

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. However, IRB approval does not guarantee access. This must be requested separately from the IRB and it is recommended that obtaining this permission be done as part of the protocol design to ensure recruitment can occur as planned.

Web Survey Consent

Use the following consent form language for anonymous or identified web surveys

This is an anonymous (or confidential, if it is not anonymous) survey. The data is being collected using a secure (encrypted) connection to the host survey service provider. Results are stored in a password protected account accessible by only the researchers and system administrators. While no absolute guarantees can be made regarding security, these measures provide safeguards against outside agents accessing the electronic data.

(effective 10.31.2015)