General Information

If you wish to recruit participants from the subject pool of the Department of Psychology, you need to first apply for departmental ethics approval. The quota of participants that can be recruited from the subject pool is set at the beginning of each term and is specific to the Department’s staff and students. The Department of Psychology will also review research ethics for certain student projects involving minimal risk and seeking to recruit participants aged 15 and above.

In case your study does not qualify for the departmental ethics review, please consider applying to SBRE or CREC.

Subject Pool Ethics Application:
http://ww9.psy.cuhk.edu.hk/subjectpool/ethics.html

Department Research Ethics Application (for studies on participants outside the subject pool):
https://esurvey.psy.cuhk.edu.hk/jfe/form/SV_6nDpriNYCE2a7yZ

Research Ethics in the Context of Covid-19

In response to the Dean's request to modify current and future ethics protocols as to include precautions related to COVID-19, our research committee has developed three documents. The documents (English and Chinese versions) have been edited and approved by the Dean. The documents include:

1) A sheet that would be added to the existing/typical consent form: Covid19_ConsentAddOn_BilangRe.doc

2) A sheet that would be given to all experimenters as guidelines: Covid19_ExperimenterGuidelines_BilangRe.doc

3) A post-experimental sheet with covid relevant information: Covid19_PostExpInformation_Bilang.doc.

The “bilangRe” at the end of the file names refers to the fact that each file has both the Chinese and English versions.

If you would like to conduct studies that involve face to face interactions during this time when the pandemic is still going on, you are requested to implement these documents into current and future research. As these are standard documents and should not depend on a specific research protocol, we have obtained the approval of the faculty that there is no need to ask everyone to resubmit their ethics application. However, we would suggest that these documents be included in future applications.

In other words, you can resume face to face studies when you implement the attached documents. Let me stress that this is not a decision that we take lightly. We wish to balance our desire to resume data collection and the need to protect our research participants and research personnel. So we should whole-heartedly conduct our studies in accordance with the requirements and procedures as laid out in the documents.