Once the board is satisfied with the outcome of the meeting, approval forms will be signed by the members.
With appropriate approvals in hand, researchers have the responsibility to obtain, at the participants’ own free will, informed consent. Informed consent is composed of two segments: making participants clearly aware of any potential dangers that might arise as a result of taking part in the study and making participants aware of the nature of the study.
At face value, it sounds conventional to inform individuals of the nature of the study, however, sometimes too much information regarding the phenomenon being studied can affect participant behavior and, therefore, research outcomes. The Hawthorne Effect, also called the observer effect, describes a change in behavior that occurs simply because the behavior is being observed (Rouse, 2014). This effect can impede true measures of the phenomenon, and, because of this, researchers must take great care when constructing the narrative that describes the purpose of the study at hand in order to preserve the trustworthiness of the data to be