Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2024
Publication Title
Communication Research Reports
Keywords
research ethics, consent, word count, reading level, institutional review boards
Abstract
Informed consent is an essential part of conducting human subjects research; but its utility is dependent on participants actually reading the consent forms provided. This research conducted secondary analysis of data (N = 1,283) to assess how long participants spent on the consent forms. Participants spent an average of 35.4 seconds on consent documents: not a nonsignficant amount of time (i.e., different from 0 seconds), but insufficient to read or even skim consent forms. Women spent slightly less time on consent forms. Neither the length nor readability of a consent form predicted time spent reading, and neither readability nor gender moderated the relationship between word count and time spent reading. Results suggest participants in communication studies do not spend enough time on a consent document to be able to read it, and therefore modern practices of informed consent do not ensure informed participation in research.
Funding Source
This article was published Open Access thanks to a transformative agreement between Milner Library and Taylor & Francis.
DOI
10.1080/08824096.2024.2379832
Recommended Citation
Parfenova, D., Niftulaeva, A., & Carr, C. T. (2024). Words, words, words: participants do not read consent forms in communication research. Communication Research Reports, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/08824096.2024.2379832
Comments
First published in Communication Research Reports: https://doi.org/10.1080/08824096.2024.2379832
Data used in this work are publicly available: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/Z4BY3
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.