Avoid requirement of submitting a gatekeeper informed consent form: a note

Avoid requirement of submitting a gatekeeper informed consent form: a note on research ethics for my MBA students

For MBA students doing dissertation projects, it is increasingly becoming more difficult to obtain a gatekeeper consent form (which is required if the student wants to study a particular organizational unit and its internal information (e.g. via interview of its staff and examination of its internal documents, etc). There is a way to avoid doing so. Essentially, this implies avoiding to collect primary and secondary internal (e.g. organizational specific) data of the organizational unit concerned.

The suggested research method practice: revise your research objective such that you only collect data not to do with the internal information of organizations. For example, you could interview your friends on their opinion about the general management concerns of the retail sector in a particular place (e.g. Hong Kong) [case 1], but not to learn their opinion (e.g. they being employees of Watsons HK) about the management concerns of a particular company, (e.g. Watsons HK) [case 2]. For case 1, there is no need to provide a gatekeeper informed consent form  from a specific organization (note **), while , for case 2, you need to provide a gatekeeper informed consent form from an authorized manager of Watsons HK. This is because, for case 2, you intend to gather internal information (e.g. Watsons HK employee opinions on Watsons HK). It is very likely that the university will reject your ethical form application for case 2 if you are not able to submit a proper gatekeeper informed consent form from Watsons HK.

Note **: if you request a manager of a particular company to introduce colleagues to you conduct opinion survey about the broader business/ industry trends, it probably is useful (nice to do?) to seek for informed consent from the manager concerned. In this case, ask the manager to fill in a gatekeeper informed consent form.

*** you need to make sure that your revised research method (no gathering of internal data of a specific organization) is useful to address your (revised) research objective (e.g. not specific organization-related).   To revise the dissertation research objective set properly, it is highly recommend to review the supportive management concerns diagram or research gap-related diagrams as propounded in the agile literature review approach.