I spent the first half of the day working on our ethics application for my new randomised control trial, which is rapidly moving into fieldwork. The second half was spent on a rapid research proposal for testing cyber security awareness.

Ethics

We drafted our low risk ethics application. All of our research meets the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research. That means putting together all our documentation for the fieldwork, including all of the questions will be asking participants, as well as the possible risks and how will mitigate them. In our case, it is only low level discomfort to participants, because the questions aren’t personal in nature.

The draft went off to our Principal Advisor, who will review it before we present it to our director tomorrow. Then it goes off for review by our internal ethics panel in the middle of the week. Fingers crossed that things go pretty smoothly from here.

Cyber

We had a meeting with some stakeholders who are interested in doing some testing on cyber security training and capability building.

I spent the second half of the day putting together a research proposal for three possible options of behavioural interventions we might be able to test to increase cyber security awareness and compliance. That was a whirlwind of research activity!

It’s gone off for internal review. Our project team meets tomorrow to finalise our presentation. Then we’ll meet with the team to put forward our options. Exciting times.