Studies with Human Participants

As a published ACM/IEEE author, you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, and IEEE Submission and Peer Review Policies including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects (Note: ACM has instituted a policy on research involving human participants and subjects as of August 15, 2021. Please check the above links if your studies involved human participants and subjects).

To support building a strong evidence base in HRI, and encourage future reproducibility of published work, all submissions involving studies with human participants clearly outline their methodology regardless of the theme they are submitted to, including:

• Participant demographics and sampling approach, e.g. gender, ethnicity, etc. (c.f., de Graaf 2017, Section 2.3, recommendations in Schlesinger et al., 2017, and HCI Gender Guidelines)
• Data collection and analysis methods (c.f., Paepcke and Takayama 2010, Section V)
• Study environment and context (c.f., Short et al. 2018, Section 3.5)
• If a Wizard-of-Oz paradigm was used, a detailed description of the robot, wizard, user, etc. (c.f., Riek 2012, Table 2)
• If a robot was used, a detailed description of the platform, its level of autonomy, capabilities, etc. (c.f., Beer et al. 2014, Figure 5).

In addition, studies that involve human participants need to include an ethical approval statement. According to the IEEE Submission and Peer Review Policies, “Authors of articles reporting on research involving human subjects or animals, including but extending beyond medical research, shall include a statement in the article that the research was performed under the oversight of an institutional review board or equivalent local/regional body, including the official name of the IRB/ethics committee, or include an explanation as to why such a review was not conducted. For research involving human subjects, authors shall also report that consent from the human subjects in the research was obtained or explain why consent was not obtained.” In the case of child users, in addition to consent from legal carers / parents, authors should describe how they obtained the oral assent from minors. Examples of such statements are “the study was approved by our Institutional Review Board” or “the study design, the experiment protocol, and the consent forms received approval from the Ethics Committee of our institution” (note that these statements must be anonymized). Additionally, during paper submission, authors will be asked to declare whether their research involves human participants, and if it does, whether approval from a relevant ethics committee was obtained.

We recognize that some researchers may work in jurisdictions where there is no mandated ethical review, or may not have access to an institutional ethics committee. In such cases, we will follow the ACM’s Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects, which lists a basic set of standards and practices that a research should follow, and states that “where such research is conducted in countries where no such local governing laws and regulations related to human participant and subject research exist, authors must at a bare minimum be prepared to show compliance with the above detailed principles.” In addition to the declaration mentioned above, the paper submission form contains also an optional question allowing authors to describe additional context related to human participant protection. If additional explanations regarding institutional review are needed, and in particular if no ethics approval was obtained for the research, the authors should answer this question with enough detail to show that their research was done in full compliance with the ethical research principles stated in the ACM Policy.