Informed consent

Informed consent

We have an updated informed consent procedure for research reviewed by the Ethical Committee of Social Sciences (ECSS) as of November 2025.

The following changes have been implemented:

• Generic templates for RU/Faculty of Social Sciences, with shorter and better understandable texts, available via ECSS website
• Based on these templates researchers compile their own study-specific general information brochure and consent forms
• Updates to the screening form and Adverse Events Procedure

The source documents:

• ⬇️Slides of the information session (pdf)
• ⬇️Instructions for completing the table (docx)
• ⬇️Template information document and consent form (docx) Ethics Committee Social Sciences, Version 1.0 November 2025 

Feel free to reach out to Miriam Kos in case of any questions.

Implementation

Since this procedure no longer uses standard forms supplied by the Institute, you will have to include the information brochure and consent form in your own experiment. For two common online experiment systems (LimeSurvey and jsPsych) we give an example how to include such a form here.

Feel free to contact Wilbert van Ham for questions about the examples.

LimeSurvey example

Demo survey for the informed consent form with all elements. This ⬇️LSS file contains the survey structure. You can download it (right click -> save as...) and import it as a new survey (Create survey -> import).

For anonymous studies all questions can be removed. For non-anonymous studies the first questions must be present. For non-medical studies the second question can be removed.

CONSENTQALL is an array with all the questions. For LimeSurvey this is one question with several subquestions. Remove the ones that you do not need. To make sure the first two subquestions are answered with Yes, there is a Question validation equation in the logic section that reads:

CONSENTQALL_SQ1=="Y" AND CONSENTQALL_SQ2=="Y"

If you do not want to force the second question to be answered with Yes, you must remove the second part:

CONSENTQALL_SQ1=="Y"

jsPsych example

Demo jsPsych experiment. You can click it to see it the way the participant sees it, at the end the data entered is shown. You can right click the experiment, after opening it, to save it.

Make sure to replace:

return (responses.mandatory_data === "no" || responses.mandatory_contact === "no")

with:

return (responses.mandatory_data === "no" )

if you have only one mandatory line instead of two.