When doing research with human subjects, please respect the rights and feelings of the people you are working with. Many people are sensitive about their language, and, if you are not careful, they may get the impression that you are criticizing or judging their speech. Please be responsible in collecting your data. In your presentation and paper, use only first names or pseudonyms-- protect the identity of the speaker/writer. At the same time, be sure to be clear about where your data comes from.
The University of Toronto has strict rules about overseeing all research involving human subjects. Guidelines and general information are Further information about how this applies in Linguistic research. The Linguistics Department has its own organization for overseeing student research.
The most important aspect of the rules regards "informed consent." You must tell people what they are being asked to participate in, and they must agree, without being coerced.
For this course, I have applied for approval for any of you to conduct research with human subjects. The form I submitted describing what sort of work you might do is posted in Blackboard, in the "Your Research Projects" folder of "Course Documents."
In that location, you will also find the Consent Form that you need to provide to people who are participating in your project. If you will be collecting data from people for your project, you will need to use this consent form. Download it, edit it to accurately represent your project (change the red parts), email it to me. When you get an ok, you can start collecting data. It may require meeting with me if I'm not clear on what you plan to do.
Return to project description.