I received a pm from a user looking to do a study on the SCP Wiki writing community for a university course and, after discussing with people in staff chat about our approach to requests like this, was advised to make a post here and start an official conversation about introducing a policy in the future to refer people to.
My response to them about what we could do as staff was:
Hi [USER]!
This is a challenging question because it is for a course so there are some limitations from our end (as SCP Wiki Staff) of what we can have on the site in terms of advertising things like studies that I hope I can help you navigate without sacrificing this opportunity.
To get the big issue out of the way first, I don't think there would be much we could do as staff to help promote this opportunity to our authorbase because there are some issues of promoting a study that hasn't gone through a proper ethics IRB that places substantial risk on the site and our duty to ensure that our users are protected as a top priority. So since this is for a class and probably will not go through an ethics review, I don't think there's really anything we can do to help communicate this to our users or post it in any official spaces.
However, after discussion with other academic staff on the site, I believe it would be alright to post this opportunity to our forum (https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/forum/c-50863/general) provided it includes some information around data usage, risk, and other information that would be required by a typical review board on a consent form. Specifically, I would recommend using a system like qualtrics (or equivalent) to house all this information and gather interest/consent with sections outlining:
- What the purpose of the study/assignment is,
- What you will be asking people for,
- What risks or benefits are associated with participating + how you will deal with this (anonymizing, etc.),
- What you will be doing with the information specifically (writing a paper for your professor and TA eyes only, destroy raw data after the course ends, etc.), and
- A contact for questions (your email probably) and concerns (most usually would be the professor's name and email in case of any issues of safety or anything).
This doesn't need to be super long or academically written either. Just something an average user would understand that honestly tells them what they are signing up for. Alternatively, you would be freely able to share your recruitment with people you know on the site but just not as something we are supporting.
[INFORMATION ABOUT SPECIFICS TO THEIR STUDY REMOVED]
I am really excited to see that you are interested in studying our community and welcome any questions or concerns you may have about what I have outlined above.
Because there are many factors that go into safety of users in conducting studies and not everyone has the same access to review boards and not every study is the same (a high school class assignment would be very different from an academic writing a paper), I think having a more formalized policy or guide to refer people to would be helpful for both users and us as staff.