Participant remuneration can be a tricky matter. If the Research Participation Credit System is not appropriate for your study and your resources are not sufficient to remunerate adequately all participants for their time, a lottery may be appropriate. Lotteries, then, constitute an alternative to paying all participants in which a relatively high reward is offered to a specified proportion of participants with those receiving the "prize" being chosen by a random draw. This can be useful if large numbers of participants are needed for relatively onerous tasks such as filling in long and numerous questionnaires.
There are clear differences of opinion about the appropriateness of this practice. Some argue that condoning such "gambling behavior" is not appropriate to the Department's role. Others counter by noting that our government is involved in such practices which indicates that they are congenial to our contemporary community standards. The GFC and CPA Code of Ethics are mute about this practice. So there is little current wisdom available about the ethical status of lotteries as a means of compensating research participants.
This lack of policy regarding lotteries indicates that the decisions to use this procedure should be taken with considerable care. The reasons for choosing this procedure should be carefully articulated on your ethics application (in Section 5.c). As well you should be careful to clearly indicate why the Research Participation Credit System is not appropriate to your study in your answer to this question.
It is mandatory that all of the details of the lottery must be presented on your Informed Consent Form. This includes:
- a clear statement of the amount of the reward(s) involved;
- a statement of the exact odds of a participant actually winning;
- a clear timetable of the draw(s);
- a clear description of the actual process of selection;
- an indication of exactly how and when payment will be made.
These requirements all derive from the CPA standards regarding informed consent (Standards I.11-I.19) Of course, in keeping with the "promises" standard of the CPA Ethical Code (Standard III.17) the researcher is honour-bound to fulfill these procedures as described in the Informed Consent Form.
