Shelia - the listservs may be a complicated situation unless you or your students run them. You might want to ask the list moderators for permission if there aren't explicit rules about off topic discussion you can cite that apply to sharing a survey link. However, sending out a survey link via your own content streams (social networks) should be fine since they're yours. It might help grease the skids with your IRB if you point them to the Ethics Guide written by the AoIR Ethics Working Group: http://aoir.org/documents/ethics-guide/ Your IRB may just have no idea what guidelines to apply to online research if they've never done any of it. If you show them the Guide, and say "Here, these are the leading experts in the field and we're adhering to the standards they wrote" it might make the IRB feel more confident that there are rules and you're following them. Good luck! Dr. Stephanie Tuszynski Assistant Professor of Communications and Media Arts Bethany College Bethany, WV ------------------------------ Message: 7 Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 08:57:17 -0500 From: Shelia Cotten <cotten@uab.edu> To: "air-l@listserv.aoir.org" <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Cc: Shelia Cotten <cotten@uab.edu> Subject: [Air-L] IRB and social media Message-ID: <985AA569D0188A4E9F689A2CC20F058C0BA42230@UABEXMBS7.ad.uab.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Hi everyone. For my grad Survey Research course this semester, I'm planning to have my students do a web-based survey to be disseminated via social media. My IRB is giving us major issues with this. We had planned to use our social networks to disseminate the survey (in part this is a methodological experiment too) - so post on our Facebook walls, email people, post on listservs, and tweet it. Our IRB doesn't want us to do anything other than email people basically. This seems so archaic given the proliferation of social media. If we are to use listservs, we have to get permission from each one and provide a letter to the IRB from each one. Thoughts, suggestions, etc. for helping us deal with this issue? Thanks in advance for any help you can provide! If you want to email me directly at cotten@uab.edu, I will be glad to post a summary of the responses. Shelia ******************************************* Shelia R. Cotten, PhD Associate Professor Department of Sociology UAB 205-934-8678 cotten@uab.edu This message may contain confidential information for the use of the addressee(s) above and may contain legally privileged information. If you are not the addressee, or the person responsible for delivering it to the addressee, you are hereby notified that reading, disseminating, distributing or copying this message is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message by mistake, immediately notify us by replying to the message and delete the original message immediately. Thank you.