Ethics
Ethics approval
If you have concerns about the conduct of this study, you are welcome to contact the Human Research Ethics Committee at The Australian National University by telephone: +61 2 6125 7945 or by email.
This project has received ethics approval (Protocol 2009/093).
Privacy
The project team do not know your name or have any way to identify you.
Your invitation to participate in the study was sent to you by your educational provider, which holds your name and contact details. If you choose to answer the online survey, your responses will be transmitted to a secure server hosting the online survey. Once all participants have submitted their surveys, the Institute will provide the project team at the ANU Legal Workshop with a data file containing all responses. Your name and contact details have not been provided by your educational provider to the Institute for Social Research or the ANU Legal Workshop and are not stored with the data, so the information that you provide cannot be linked back to you.
To further ensure your privacy, publications based upon the survey data will only contain results aggregated across groups of individuals (for example, the results for males and females, or the results for persons working in metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas).
While the complete dataset from the survey can only be accessed by the project team, de-identified data may be made available to other interested researchers with prior ethical approval. De-identification means that information in the data that could indirectly be used to identify you is removed or aggregated to a less detailed level. For example, suburb names will be replaced with the region or state in which the suburb is located in the de-identified data set. Giving other researchers access to de-identified data will ensure that the data are more widely used and increase the chances that the study will have positive impacts on work, training and legal education.
Your consent
Your name and email address are held by the educational provider where you completed your law qualification. The educational provider sent an e-mail to you on our behalf, asking you to participate in the study.
If you completed law qualifications with more than one educational provider in Australia between 1991 and 2010, you may receive e-mails inviting you to participate in the study from each of those educational providers. You only need to participate once.
You may receive a 'reminder email' after submitting your responses to the online survey. Since names and contact details have not been stored with survey responses, it is necessary to send reminder emails to the entire sample in order to remind those persons who have not yet had a chance to complete their survey to do so.
Thank you for your participation in the study and please disregard the reminder emails if you have already completed the questionnaire.
