Parents’ Perceptions of Parental Consent Procedures for Social Science Research in the School Context

Institutional review boards typically require researchers to use active parental consent procedures when studying children and adolescents. However, asking for active consent leads to smaller and more biased samples, and a larger total burden for parents. Therefore, asking for passive parental consent might be preferable, but this comes with uncertainty regarding whether the parent has received and understood the information. Choosing between active and passive consent has mainly been debated by academics, but parents are also important stakeholders and it is unclear how consent procedures fit the needs and preferences of the parents of prospective participants. In this study, we used an online survey in which parents (N = 156, based on resource constraints and Bayesian updating (with a Bayes factor > 3) were exposed to video vignettes of multiple types of research in the classroom and were asked to indicate how they rate active and passive parental consent in terms of appropriateness. We used a reversed inferior hypothesis to test whether active consent was not rated as more appropriate than passive consent. The results indicated that parents perceived active consent procedures as more appropriate in most types of research. However, passive consent was rated comparably appropriate for some types of research, particularly for secondary school children. Furthermore, we explored factors that could affect the perceptions of parents and considered other aspects of providing consent that we displayed in an online dashboard. We concluded by providing recommendations for when and how to use active or passive parental consent for communication science research in the school context.