For parents

Because of the nature of the study (understanding dynamics within the classroom), it’s important to get as many answers as we can from each classroom, so we really appreciate that you fill out the consent form.

Below, we answer some common questions parents may have about the nature of the study, but please contact us if you have any other questions that you would like answered before providing consent.

Who answers the questionnaires?

The questionnaires are completed by students whose parents have given their child permission to participate in the study (in addition to the child’s own consent). The student has the right to refuse to answer individual questions or the entire survey if they wish.

What types of questions are asked?

Across each component of DWELL, different types of questions will be asked, such as about friendships, well-being, possible bullying experiences, and coping strategies.  

In addition, in the pilot study, DWELL SURVEY and DWELL DAILY, students are asked questions in which they evaluate their classmates. These questions are called peer evaluations. Peer evaluations are a very common research method in developmental psychology. By googling the search terms “peer evaluation” or “peer nomination” you can find information on research projects where this method has been used.

There is no need to name anyone for any question in the survey, i.e. it is always possible to choose the option “no one”. The student can also completely not answer a certain question (or of course the entire survey, participation is completely voluntary).

Whether or not peer evaluation questions can cause conflicts and problems has been studied quite a lot, and no indications have been found of negative effects on, for example, young people’s interaction, class relationships or young people’s self-esteem. In all kinds of surveys, you always have to think about possible disadvantages in relation to the benefit to be achieved. Especially for children and young people, it is important that surveys do not cause harm or risks. That’s why this issue has also been clarified quite a lot in the case of peer evaluations, by us and others, and we trust that there are no such negative effects.

Here you can find examples of these studies:
Example 1
Example 2

The DWELL project has gone through a very strict ethical pre-evaluation: it has been evaluated by both the European Research Council’s ethics committee and the humanities research ethics committee of the University of Turku. In other words, we have had to think about research ethics questions exceptionally carefully.

Who can see student responses?

All information from the surveys stored for us researchers is stored anonymously, with the help of the students’ “code numbers”. Names of the participants or their classmates will never be shared or used in the research.

Naturally, no one at the school gets to know the answers of children or how classmates have evaluated a certain student.

We hope that you feel free to contact us if you have any questions! Contact information dwell(at)utu.fi