How emotions contribute to graduate students’ psychological responses during their online application for human subject research approval

This paper aims to focus on how doctoral students’ emotional arousal influenced their cognition in a challenging online application activity, that of applying for online Institutional Review Board approval for human subject research. Participants were social science doctoral students. Data were collected in two sessions: a video/audio-recorded work session and a follow-up interview. Results are presented in three themes derived inductively from qualitative data analysis.

The authors took a qualitative approach to study the nature of participants’ experiences. Participants were 11 graduate students recruited as they were about to submit an application for approval from the university’s review board charged with ensuring the ethical treatment of research participants. These students were pursuing doctoral degrees in education fields in a research-intensive US university. Data were collected in two sessions: a video/audio-recorded “work session” in which participants worked on their IRB application, and a post-interview session that used the video-record for stimulated recall. For the first session, participants were instructed to narrate aloud what they were thinking and feeling during the activity. Camtasia software was used to capture each participant’s desktop and mouse pointer movements. Cameras simultaneously captured video and audio recordings of the participants’ facial expressions and speech. These work sessions, and the subsequent interview sessions, occurred in a small quiet room with wireless access. Analysis proceeded in four phases. First, the authors made a transcript of the work sessions, screen-capturing participants’ faces whenever they spoke aloud, took action as they interacted with the website or showed some sort of emotion. They referred to these freeze shots as frames. The frames allowed us to track the time individuals spent in different episodes of the application. Second, the authors labelled the emotions they saw, with two researchers working together and bringing any discrepancies to the larger research team for consensus decisions. Third, to these transcripts of the first session, the authors connected interview transcript segments.

Results are presented in three themes derived inductively from qualitative data analysis. Theme 1 indicates that emotions accompanied processes involved in the online application. Theme 2 suggests that new users differed from more experienced users in the amount, valence and intensity of emotions. Theme 3 describes one source of these differences, experienced users’ greater knowledge of the process and equanimity in the face of possible mistakes. These results shed light on emotions as these arise in the course of accomplishing an increasingly common task, that of filling out a Web application that is personally consequential but not user-friendly.

The authors aimed to understand better the emotional experiences of graduate students by moving beyond the more global explorations of graduate students’ cumulative experiences.