Steps for conducting social science experiments at ESSEXLab

The following document outlines the procedures any researcher should follow if conducting social
science experiments using ESSEXLab.
Experiments run at ESSEXLab must always:
1. Be non-deceptive; and
2. Have ethical approval from your department.

Step 1. Approval
Faculty Ethics Committee (FEC) Approval
All experiments run at the ESSEXLab must be approved by one of the FECs before conducting the
experiment. Find out more about the process of approval.

ESSEXLab Approval
All experiments run in the Laboratory, or using the participant database, must be approved by the Lab
Manager. Copies of the following documents must be made available to the manager before
schedules are booked:

Ethical approval
Consent forms
Participant instructions
Any planned changes to the standard recruiting email

The Lab Manager will check that the project has ethical approval, fulfils the labs criteria as set out
below, has been presented in a brown bag seminar and has been paid for according to our charging
scheme, if required. (As of January 2013, payments are not required for experiments in which
University staff or students are co-authors).

Step 2. Brown bag seminar

Experimenters planning to use the Laboratory must make a brown bag presentation of their
experimental design at an Essex Experimental Seminar before the first experimental session. For
PhD students, the design must be approved by the Lab Director and members of the steering
committee attending the seminar, before it goes ahead.

Step 3. Submit the Experiment Request Form

Submit an Experiment Request Form.

Step 4. Testing
To schedule a new experiment (or if you have made major changes) a pre-test of your experiment will
be necessary. Please contact the Lab Manager one or two weeks prior to a planned experiment. You
(or your programmer) will need to perform a test run of your software one week before we proceed
with the booking.

Step 5. Scheduling

1.

Please make sure you have completed all of the required previous steps before you schedule an
experiment.
Laboratory sessions must be booked via the online administration system. Trained experimenters at
the University may apply for accounts as experimenters in the online system; they are then able to
book sessions and invite participants themselves. Other users of the laboratory must schedule
sessions via the Lab Manager.
To schedule a session for an experiment that has already been run in the lab, contact the Lab
Manager. You can check the calendar to make sure the date is open. If you need a lab assistant
please also contact him/her to make sure the timing fits with his/her schedule.
We will recruit based on parameters you provided via the Experiment Request Form.
Depending on the time of the year, recruitment should start at least three days prior to the start of the
experiment. Overbooking by about 45% is usually needed (more during exam weeks).

Step 6. Run your experiment

Please review our Guide to in-lab experiments (.pdf) for more information

2.