Email received today: Dear Colleague: I’m on faculty in the School of Human Resources Management, and I’m asking your kind permission to recruit students in your classroom for a study before the end of the fall term. It should take only 5 minutes to introduce the study and write a web link on the board (i.e., students take the survey outside of class). The survey measures personality and job perceptions. As incentives, students will receive personality feedback, a summary of the results, and three chances to win $50. Please let me know if you’re willing to help, what dates work for you, and whether a class beginning or break would be best. I’ve attached our ethics approval certificate. Let me know if you’d like more information. Thank you very much! P.S. Please ‘Reply to All’ to include my research assistant! Regards, , Sessional Assistant Professor My response: ---------------- Dear Colleague: I’m on faculty in a discipline that does not ask its students to think of themselves as resources. I’m asking your kind permission to recruit your students for an exercise that will involve having them read a book. It will take more than 5 minutes, but they may learn something more valuable than how some reductive measure of their personality aligns with job perceptions. As incentives, students will gain some insight into themselves and the world around them, and while I cannot offer them three chances to win $50, my hope is that they may learn something that allows them to think of themselves as something other than consumers and that makes them less likely to think that three chances to win $50 is a worthwhile incentive. Please let me know if you’re willing to help, what dates work for you, and whether you’d like to me to just come for a couple hours and give them a sense of what a real lecture is like. I have no ethics approval certificate since none of what I propose is as questionable as your study is. Let me know if you’d like more information or perhaps a list of books that your students would find more enriching than whatever textbook you’re forcing them to read. Thank you very much!
Posted on: Thu, 05 Sep 2013 15:48:14 +0000