A: It's possible that your funder, IRB, and/or school system may make the decision for you. More institutions are requiring active parental consent, which means that a parent has to sign a consent form before his/her child can be included in a study. A lack of response is treated as a refusal to participate in the research. If you're involved in a longitudinal study or asking questions about sensitive topics, then you'll probably need to use active parental consent procedures. Even if active consent isn't required, school administrators may be more willing to allow research in their schools if they know that parents will have to explicitly give approval for their children to participate in the research.

If you are in a position to choose between active and passive parental consent, then you'll want to consider your budget because gaining active parental consent is a more costly endeavor and will involve more time. You should also be aware that passive consent procedures typically result in higher participation rates, which is more likely to yield a representative sample of the population.

A: A variety of methods have been investigated to increase participation rates with active parental consent. Three methods often suggested are:

• in-person strategies in which researchers may make home visits


• mailing consent information directly to the parents


• having students deliver consent forms to their parents

Of those three, in-person consent strategies are the most expensive because they can involve multiple home visits and may require additional staff and travel. It is important to note that the three methods above are often supplemented with personalized follow-up and communication strategies.

When recruiting participants for the International Youth Development Study's pilot study, we wanted to compare return and participation rates between direct mailings to parents and student-delivered consent forms because the two methods often are not directly compared in the same study. We had a student population of 1,058 students in 46 schools in the state of Washington in the United States and the state of Victoria in Australia, and each school was randomly assigned either to a postal method for getting parental consent or to a student-delivered method.

Each condition also involved following up with replacement packets for parents who had not responded when possible and phone calls to answer questions and to remind parents about the consent packets, and the importance of these follow-up techniques were important to both methods as well individual and class incentives and school personnel involvement.

We found that using the student-delivered method rather than the postal method resulted in higher active consent rates. The student-delivered method schools achieved an 89% return rate/78% participation rate, while the postal method schools had a 58% return rate/52% participation rate. We also noticed that students in private schools were about twice as likely as students in public schools to return consent forms and to obtain parental consent to participate in the study.

A: One difference is that incentives are not typically offered to research participants in Australia, so the incentive structure differed between schools there and schools in the United States. Students in the student-delivered method schools in Washington State were offered a $100 gift certificate for their class if the class had a 90% return rate within two weeks, and Washington State students in both conditions were given $10 once the survey was administered. In contrast, each student in Victoria was rewarded with a project pen for returning the signed consent form. The result was what you might expect: return rates for Victoria schools were significantly lower compared with Washington State schools.