York’s Human Participant Review Sub-Committee (HPRC) has reviewed and approved the protocol for compliance with Senate ethics policy and any questions may be forwarded to Alison M. Collins-Mrakas, Senior Manager & Policy Advisor, Research Ethics at 416-736-5914. You may also contact the ACHA-NCHA Survey administrator, Suruthi Ragulan, Project Coordinator: Health Education and Promotion at 416-736-2100 extension 33872, suruthi@yorku.ca.
You have the right to withdraw from participating in the survey at any time without penalty and/or harm; your participation is entirely voluntary and you may stop participating at any time. If you feel that answering specific demographic questions might reveal your identity, you may leave them blank. You may answer only some questions, or you may choose not to participate in the survey at all. Should you choose to withdraw, any material collected as a result will be destroyed.
There may be some personal discomfort with the content of certain questions. For example, there are questions regarding illegal substance use, interpersonal violence and sexual behavior. If you’d like to talk with someone about issues addressed in the survey, please do not hesitate to connect with York University’s Student Counselling & Development for additional support.
The ACHA-NCHA web survey administration is confidential, not anonymous. However, any connection between a student and their survey responses is destroyed by Qualtrics as soon as the survey responses are submitted. While the survey is not administered anonymously, survey responses are “anonymized” as they are submitted to the secure server.
ACHA agrees to use the student email address provided by the institution for the sole purpose of requesting student participation in the ACHA-NCHA. The email addresses are used only for a single survey effort and not retained for future NCHA implementations at the same school. During data collection, the email addresses are stored on a password protected secure server at ACHA. The file containing student email addresses is also uploaded into Qualtrics Research Suite software. Per both the Qualtrics and ACHA policies, student email addresses are never shared with another party nor used for any other purpose. After the data collection period ends and before ACHA-NCHA results are released to the campus, the files containing student email addresses are deleted from the both the Qualtrics and ACHA servers. To ensure that no copy of student email addresses is retained at ACHA, the files containing student email addresses are intentionally omitted from nightly file back-up at ACHA.
To ensure confidentiality, e-mail addresses are destroyed by ACHA before data is compiled and shared with York University. The raw data file that is shared with York University will not contain any unique identifiers. Data transmission is encrypted and firewall securities are in place. Any reports or publications based on this research will use only group data and will not identify you or any individual as being affiliated with this project.
When you click on the survey link, you will connect directly to Qualtrics – the company used by ACHA to administer the survey – which is independent of York University. When linking to the site, you leave the privacy protection of York University and your personal information will be subject to applicable United States laws.
