A Case For Passive Consent Posted on March 19, 2007 Maria Elena Torre (bio) describes how passive consent worked best for her participatory action research project

All of the youth researchers that participated with us signed, had their parents fill out consent forms and the students signed assent forms, and for the large survey that we did, the young people created a survey that went out to 10,000 students.

They were 9th and 12th graders, and all of those students were sent permission forms, consent forms, but they were actually passive consent, so that if the parents did not want their students to fill out the survey, then they handed the forms in.

The reason that we used that strategy is because too often when you have active consent forms, the students who tend to hand those back in are wealthier and whiter, and we were asking about educational inequities.

We were looking to see how opportunities were distributed across race and class, and so, if we just used active consent, we were afraid that we weren't gonna get a representative sample. So, we used a passive consent strategy.

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