Participant Consent Form
Understanding How Undergraduate Students Engage with AI Chatbots (The DIALOGUE Study)
| Role | Name and contact |
|---|---|
| Principal Investigator (Faculty Supervisor) | Dr. Jean-Christophe Bélisle-Pipon, Faculty of Health Sciences, SFU. Email: jean-christophe_belisle-pipon@sfu.ca |
| Student Lead (Co-Investigator) | Melika Tehrani, Faculty of Health Sciences, SFU. Email: mta146@sfu.ca |
| Study contact | Mta146@sfu.ca, the fastest way to reach the team. |
| Funding | Principal investigator research funds (Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar Award). |
Invitation and purpose
You are invited to take part in a research study about how SFU undergraduate students actually use AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Deep Seek, Meta AI or Copilot in everyday life: across different areas of their lives, including education and career, health and wellbeing, relationships and social life, finances and practical matters, identity and personal growth, leisure and everyday tasks, travel, cooking and food, creative projects, and technology and coding.
Your participation is voluntary
Taking part is entirely your choice. Your decision has no connection to your grades, your standing, or your access to any university service, and no instructor will ever know whether you participated. You may skip any survey question you prefer not to answer, you may choose which conversations you share, and you may stop at any time. To avoid any pressure, students currently taking a course taught by a member of our team, or a course where a team member is a teaching assistant, cannot participate this term.
What you will be asked to do
- All study activities will be completed online, using SFU SurveyMonkey and the DIALOGUE De-ID Studio, at a time and place convenient for you. You will not be required to attend an in-person research session.
- Using our Transcript Preparation Guide, select 8 to 10 of your real chatbot conversations from a range of the conversation categories used in the DIALOGUE De-ID Studio. If you have fewer conversations in one category, you may include additional conversations from another. The minimum is 8 conversations in total. If you have fewer conversations in one topic, you may include additional conversations from another topic, provided that you include at least 5 different topics overall.
- Upload your selected chatbot conversations to the secure SFU-hosted DIALOGUE De-ID Studio. The De-ID Studio assists in identifying and removing personal identifiers and generates a de-identified version for you to review. You may make additional edits before deciding whether to submit it to the research team. You will review the de-identified version before deciding whether to submit it to the research team. If you would like assistance, you may book an optional 30-minute preparation session with the student lead.
- Submit the participant-reviewed, de-identified conversations through the secure DIALOGUE De-ID Studio and answer five brief questions about each conversation (category, AI platform, approximate date, why you selected it, and how typical and satisfying the interaction was). You will be asked to reconfirm your consent before submitting your conversations.
- Complete an online survey (on SFU Survey Monkey) about your chatbot habits, attitudes, and experiences (about 20 to 25 minutes).
- Altogether this takes most people about 90 to 120 minutes, spread over up to two weeks, on your own schedule.
Possible risks and discomforts
The main consideration is privacy, because chat conversations can contain personal details. The section below explains the layered protections we apply. Some students may also feel mild discomfort rereading conversations from a stressful period; you decide what to share, you may skip any area, and a resource sheet with free support services is attached to this form and provided again at the end of the study. Nothing you share will be used to assess academic misconduct, and your data will never be shown to instructors or university administrators.
Possible benefits
You may find it interesting to reflect on your own chatbot habits, and you will receive a curated resource sheet. The broader benefit is that your real experiences will shape an educational game and published research that help other students use these tools wisely.
Compensation
You will receive a $50 (CAD) digital gift card: $30 after submitting your conversations and $20 after completing the survey. If you stop partway, you keep the portion already earned, and submitting at least 8 conversations earns the full first portion, and completing the survey earns the full second portion. Compensation never depends on sharing any particular kind of content.
How we protect your information
All study data are kept on SFU OneDrive, a university service that stores data on servers in Canada, in folders restricted to the research team. We protect your conversations through multiple layers. First, your selected chatbot conversations are processed through the secure SFU-hosted DIALOGUE De-ID Studio, which assists in identifying and removing personal identifiers. You review the de-identified version before deciding whether to submit it to the research team. Second, a trained member of the research team verifies the de-identification and replaces any remaining identifiers with standardized labels (e.g., [NAME-1]) where necessary. Third, before any quotation is ever used, two team members independently assess it to ensure that it cannot reasonably identify you, and distinctive details are modified where necessary to reduce any remaining risk of re-identification. Your original uploaded files are permanently deleted within 30 days once a verified de-identified copy has been produced. The list linking your name to your data is kept separately, is accessible only to the principal investigator and the student lead, and your entry on it is destroyed 30 days after your submission. The de-identified data are kept securely for at least five years after publication. Your conversations and survey answers are never uploaded to, or processed by, any commercial AI service, and your name will not appear in any presentation or publication.
Limits of confidentiality
There are rare situations where the law requires the team to act: if information indicates that a child is at risk of abuse or neglect, if information indicates an imminent risk of serious harm to you or to another person, or if records are ordered released by a court. In such situations the team would share only the minimum information necessary.
People mentioned in your conversations
Chats often mention friends, family, or instructors. Please choose conversations that are not primarily about another identifiable person, or carefully review the de-identified version generated by the DIALOGUE De-ID Studio before submitting your conversations. In addition, our de-identification process removes other people's names and identifying details wherever possible, and our analysis focuses on your chatbot use, not on the people you mention.
Withdrawing from the study
You may withdraw some or all of your data, without giving a reason and without penalty, at any time until your linking entry is destroyed, which happens 30 days after your submission; simply email the study contact and your data will be deleted.
After that point we can no longer locate your individual records, so your data cannot be removed from the de-identified dataset, although they would only ever appear in aggregate form.