On Sept. 18, NYU Abu Dhabi students received an email from Professor Paula England inviting them to take a survey about friendship networks at NYUAD for her Gender and Society class. Respondents’ names would enter a raffle for an iPad under 500 USD or the equivalent in cash. The email also stated responses would be kept confidential.  A few hours after the survey went live, a group of students started voicing their concerns on the university’s Student Life Facebook group.

The survey originally asked respondents to provide information about three friends and a significant other’s sex, major, religion, ethnicity and home country. In addition, it requested that respondents rated their identified friends and significant other’s political and religious views, rate their attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10. Respondents were supposed to provide the same information about whom they considered the most popular person in the university and themselves.

Senior Alexander Peel said he felt uncomfortable by the amount of intimate information students in the Gender and Society class would have when examining responses to the survey.

“What I found most unnerving was that Ms. England didn’t plan to give the student responses any sort if anonymity and that members of her class would know intimate details about NYUAD students, knowledge which can be socially hazardous in such a small community,” said Peel.

England responded to this concern by eliminating the name items from the survey and circulating a second version of the survey.  However, some students remained worried at the possibility of deductive identification.  When consulted about this, England explained that although a possibility, this is not the objective of the exercise.

“I can tell you that the way this kind of quantitative research ... from surveys where you tick the box ... is done, [where] we’re looking at statistical tables and stuff ... going in and identifying a specific person even if you could do it ... its just not what you do in this kind of research,” England explained.

She further elaborated on the issue of confidentiality and access to data.

“[The consent section] said any names you give and other information would only be seen by the professor and ... the small research team which I’d assume people would realize its the class although I didn’t explicitly say that… but obviously it wasn’t specific enough,” she admitted.

Freshmen and Gender and Society student Roman Kohut said England took precautions to ensure her students did not have access to respondents’ personal information.

“She set the [survey settings] in such a way that students in her class could only edit questions in the survey, but not retrieve the data from it. All personal information was deleted by Professor England before the data was passed on to us,” Kohut explained.

Sophomore Monika Filipovska said that besides the issue of confidentiality, the ethnic categories included in the survey discriminated against certain identities.

“I found it challenging to place [a friend] in one of the categories for race, specifically because she is racially mixed and the survey did not allow selecting more than one of the options offered for race and I had to inconveniently place [my friend] in 'Other' because of this,” Filipovska said.

When consulted about this, England explained that this is not a product of a discriminatory drive but out of statistical convenience.

“Statistically anything that is a really tiny category and there is hardly anybody in it, you’ll have to collapse it into some ‘other’ anyhow or, by the way, you’re identifying people. What I could have done, of course that would have meant much more questions … is say ‘check all that apply’,” England said.

England also commented in other items for which the survey received criticism, such as the attractiveness scale in which respondents were asked to locate their friends and significant other.

“I’m not under any illusion that there is some objective thing of attractiveness and I’m certainly not under any illusion that we are measuring it really accurately … but I can tell you that there are many many studies ... that find that simple ratings of attractiveness really predict things,” England said.

Student concerns gave way to questioning about whether or not the survey needed approval from the university’s Institutional Review Board, which evaluates research involving human subjects.  England said that a member of the IRB told her class exercises were exempted of such evaluation.

“My understanding, straight from a person at IRB, was [that review is] not required if something is only a class project and isn’t going to be used outside of class,” said England.

Associate Dean of Social Sciences and IRB member Hannah Brückner explained that, since  class exercises do not fall under the scope of research, they do not need IRB approval.

“The regulations that we have specified that we are not policing class exercises. It’s something that we don’t do because we don’t classify that as research … the class exercise is not ... framed as a contribution to science, to the literature, to what we know about social life and therefore we cannot make a judgement about it,” Brückner stated.

However, Brückner appealed to the community at large to behave professionally when dealing with information about human subjects.

“Certainly there is an ethical issue in this in the sense that it is a small community [and] it’s easy to identify people … now I would trust and I have trust that in the past … [people behave as] professional researchers who are not interested in gossiping about individuals [but] in the dynamics of the place,” Brückner stated.

Regarding the controversy England apologized to those who felt their confidentiality was compromised.

“I am really sorry for any discomfort people felt about confidentiality [and] I hope I have taken steps so students in the class will not see any names,” England said.