1. Role and remit of the Faculty Ethics Officer

The Faculty Ethics Officer will be responsible:

(1) For ensuring that all research involving human participants or data is either assessed by the Faculty Ethics Committee, the Psychology Ethics Sub-committee or has already been assessed by an LREC (e.g., this might apply to data collected elsewhere, but used in projects carried out in the Statistics Department or in the Robertson Centre).

(2) For convening the Faculty Ethics Committee and the Psychology Ethics Sub-committee.

2. Terms of reference, membership and procedures of the Faculty Ethics Committee and the Psychology Ethics Sub-committee.

What follows reflects the outcomes of preliminary discussions between the Faculty Ethics Officer and the Dean and discussion at the Faculty Management Group. Inevitably it represents a first stab at defining guidelines and procedures. We would expect these to be modified in the light of experience over the first year or so of the committees’ operation.

1. Terms of reference.

The faculty plans to set up one main faculty-wide ethics committee together with a departmental sub-committee in Psychology and a special data register in Statistics. The psychology sub-committee will continue to deal with all undergraduate projects in Psychology. All other research in the faculty that involves human participants or data will be assessed by the main faculty committee. In addition, the statistics department is to set up a register to record LREC ethical approval for health related statistical data that is being used in their projects.

2. Membership

The faculty ethics committee will consist of 4 members from Psychology, 2 each from Mathematics, Statistics and Computing Science and 1 member from outside the faculty (11 members in all). The psychology sub-committee will be made up of the 4 psychologists on the faculty committee.

3. Procedures

Both the faculty committee and the psychology sub-committee will use the British Psychology Society ethical guidelines as the principal basis for ethical judgement (See the accompanying ‘BPSethics.pdf’ document ). Additional material will be added as required to cover research that does not readily fall under these guidelines.

The faculty ethics committee will normally meet at least four times a year. This will be subject to review and with a provision that special meetings can be convened to deal with projects requiring special review (as indicated below). These meetings will be reserved to discuss the general procedures of the committee and to consider any proposal that does not satisfy the fast-track review procedure outlined below.

1. Fast–track review procedure

Proposals will be submitted electronically using the template form in Appendix1 (note that for each question in the form the appropriate sections of the BPS guidelines are indicated). Each proposal will then be assigned a unique project number and e-mailed to all members of the committee. Members of the committee will be expected to assess the proposal according to the appropriate sections of the BPS guidelines and respond accordingly to the convenor. Their response will either record that all relevant sections of the submission satisfy the guidelines or indicate how any section of the proposal does not satisfy the guidelines. Once the convenor has received comments from at least 4 members of the committee, he will deal with the proposal accordingly. If all the responses indicate no problems with any section then the proposal will be accepted. If any section produces comment it will be returned for amendment by the author or if the proposal is sufficiently controversial it will be dealt with by the special review procedure outlined below.

It is planned to develop a more streamlined web-based version of this procedure which will record each committee member’s clearance of each section and section by section comments on the proposal.

2. Special review procedure

If the convenor or any other committee member feels that a proposal is sufficiently controversial to require discussion, then the proposal will be held over for consideration by the whole committee at its next meeting (see above).