The study of "scientific excellence" is taking on increasing importance in the development of research policies in many nations. However, scientific excellence is difficult to define because of its multidimensional and highly complex character. This work contributes to the state of the art by exploring an effective, simple, and…

Active parental consent policies have been blamed for low participation rates and selection bias (i.e., loss of "high-risk" youths) in school-based studies. In this article, the authors describe active consent procedures that produced an overall active consent rate of 79% in a sample of more than 4,500 middle school students attending 29…

Discusses ethical issues surrounding passive and active parental consent procedures when minors are to be asked sensitive research questions, exploring parental rights and the effect of active consent procedures on response rates and sample bias. Response rates are reported from two studies in which active consent procedures were implemented. (SLD)

The authors examined factors influencing the return rates for attempting to collect active parental consent forms from 21,123 students in the 7th through 10th grades in 41 middle and high schools. Overall return rates from middle schools were higher than from high schools. Schools that offered high levels of staff support for collecting consent…

Many school-based research efforts require active parental consent for student participation. Maximizing rates of consent form return and agreement is an important issue, because sample representativeness may be compromised when these rates are low. This article compares two methods for obtaining active parental consent: return of consent forms in…

The focus groups technique is described, giving details about the methodology. As a practical application, a study of teacher perspectives toward reform in the Spanish educational system is presented. Issues of group size, the moderator's role, and drawing conclusions from group responses are discussed. (SLD)

This study investigates whether the type of parental permission affects prevalence estimates for risk behaviors from the national 2001 Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Participants were 13,195 students from 143 schools, of which 65% used passive permission and 35% active permission. Student participation rates were 86.7% in passive permission schools…

Schools offer a convenient setting for research on adolescents. However, obtaining active written parental consent is difficult. In a 6th-grade smoking study, students were recruited with two consent procedures: active consent (parents must provide written consent for their children to participate) and implied consent (children may participate…