Data Protection and Ethics
This research has been fully approved by the Research Ethics Committee in National University of Ireland, Galway.
Every effort will be made to keep your child’s personal information confidential. This project is compliant with the recommendation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), an European regulation to protect the rights of people regarding their personal data. We conducted a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) and created a plan with measures to protect yours and your child’s personal data which was approved by both the NUI Galway’s Data Protection Officer and the NUI Galway’s Ethics Committee (an ethics committee that helps protect people involved in research). The measures include the following:
- Keep yours and your child’s personal data stored in a secure, encrypted and password-protected server within NUI Galway premises (Data Science Institute/NUI Galway) for no longer than 3 years.
- Keep the storage server isolated from the internet, the only possible connection being from inside the Data Science Institute/NUI Galway's network.
- The only people who will have access to yours and your child’s personal data records are the researchers listed here.
- After 3 years, all the personal data will be deleted.
- We are not going to share yours and your child’s personal data with anyone else.
- No information which could identify you or your child will be shared in publications about this study.
Possible risk and plan to minimise it
The study's tasks are designed to elicit a change in emotion. They are everyday tasks many children encounter and so these tasks serve to create typical scenarios that children with autism often experience. There is a possibility the study may cause some temporary level of emotional stress on the children participating in it through two tasks: Playing a game and answering a math quiz. Because of that, we put in place actions to ensure the emotional wellbeing of the participants. Those actions are: After each of the tasks, there are calming contents to support the child's emotion regulation, for example, child-friendly guided breathing exercises. On top of that, the child can request for a pause or to stop the session altogether. Another key point to make sure the child is well is the presence of the parent, who can also request a pause or to stop the session. Additionally, the researcher conducting the study received training on how to interact with children with autism and is supported by researchers, during the sessions, with extensive experience in working with children with autism. They have the training and experience on how to intervene if the child becomes upset during the study. The actions described above were reviewed and approved by both the University's Research Ethics Committee and the University's Data Protection Officer.
Last Updated: 17th August, 2021.
