When handling data about members of the public or making changes to service delivery, it is important to ensure that appropriate data protection procedures are followed, and any ethical considerations have been identified and addressed.
Data protection
Things to consider:
- Check that you are adhering to your organisation’s Data Protection Policy
- Ask your data protection officer to review your plans to check that they are compliant
Ethical considerations
When your project involves activities and data that are a routine part of your service delivery, then any associated ethical considerations are unlikely to be complex. It is, however, always important to think through ethical issues when you are setting up and running an experiment.
If you are trying out something completely new, or collecting more data than you would routinely use in the course of your day-to-day work, then there will be deeper ethical considerations to make, and it can be helpful to get some external advice or review.
Things to consider:
- Does your organisation have research governance procedures in place that you should follow? This may include ethical review.
- Are there any circumstances where additional consents from participants should be sought?
- Have you considered any implications for equality and diversity?
- Have you identified potential risks and mitigations?
- Have you thought about how to make your project design in keeping with standards for best practice (for example by following the advice in this toolkit!)
- Is there a designated person with responsibility for the project?
- It is best practice to record your thinking about the ethical issues that are relevant to your project as part of your project documentation. We’ve included an example below.
Resources
Equality Framework for Local Government (Local Government Association, 2021)
The Local Government Association has published a range of guidance and resources about the General Data Protection Regulation here.
British Educational Research Association guidance for research can be found here.
Example documentation of ethical considerations from a behaviourally informed letter trial:
There will be benefits to children if by changing the text of our standard letter we can encourage more parents to take up the childcare offer for 2-year olds. As well as benefits to individual children, there will be benefits for society if more disadvantaged children access high quality care. This project will help us find out how to do this best.
The risk of harm is minimal. Parents won’t give direct ‘consent’ to take part but they can reasonably expect to be contacted because we routinely send out invitation letters and monitor uptake as part of our statutory service delivery.
We will follow our organisational data protection guidelines when carrying out this project.
Considerations for families from protected groups: we will make sure that the planned changes to the letter are checked for culturally appropriate language and are inclusive of all family types.
We followed the guidance in the NESTA-BIT EY Toolkit to ensure our project is well-designed.
X has been nominated as project lead.
