How to create a consent form with signature that meets IRB requirements? | XM Community
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How to create a consent form with signature that meets IRB requirements?

  • 3 April 2019
  • 2 replies
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I have a question about Qualtrics capabilities. One of our surveys will be an eligibility screener that includes a consent form that gives the research team permission to access the respondents' administrative data. We need a signature for consent, and just having respondents read the consent language in the text of a question on Qualtrics and then sign if they agree does not meet the consent requirements. We need them to view the form and also get a PDF of the signed version after they sign it and complete the survey. I think that through Qualtrics API and Docusign's API we could pull everything but the signature from responses to previous survey questions (this consent is not for the survey, so they will take the survey first whether or not they decide to consent to admin data sharing) into a Docusign form embedded in Qualtrics and have them sign the Docusign form, and the completed form could be emailed to the respondent through Docusign. I would rather not go this route if possible because we would need to pay for Docusign and access to their API, plus communication between the services adds complexity to the survey that seems like it could be buggy depending on the respondent's computer or phone and signal/wifi strength. Is there a way to accomplish this in Qualtrics or some other way that is more straightforward? I am grateful for any suggestions.

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Does the maintainer of the admin data have a website that allows the release of the information that you want? You could put a link to that site with an embedded code for your project where the user logs in.

For example, if you are obtaining course grades from a college, the user would be redirected to the college's site where the user logs in and can then authorize the release the information to you.

Check with the maintainer of the data. They may have gone through this before and already have some process in place.
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Hi Elizabeth! This is definitely possible using features built into Qualtrics. No need to use API calls :)
This page walks over the basis of creating a consent page, and how to remove respondents who do not consent.
For your signature aspect, you can use the signature question type!
Lastly, you have a couple different options for providing respondents the PDF when they're done. You can do an email task with response reports enabled, show a response summary at the end of the survey, or use an end of survey element to show the PDF of the response.
I hope this helps!

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