Students cautious of survey emails
By Lauren Mangeri
Staff Writer
Students recently received an e-mail from a "Wake Forest" source asking them to fill out a drinking survey in exchange for a $15 gift card. Some students decided to fill out the survey with no problem, but some students questioned if it was legitimate. Some students thought that this survey was a scam because there was no identification that the survey was related to UNCP on the e-mail at all.
Any survey has to go through a process to get approved by UNCP, according to Dr. Timothy Hayes, chair of the Institutional Review Board (IRB), and assistant professor for the Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice. At the end of the process, there will be an IRB protocol labeled at the bottom of the survey indicating it is an approved UNCP survey.
As of now, UNCP has shut down all operations to receive e-mails from outside source surveys, Dr. Hayes said. They want to make sure that these surveys have gone through the process of becoming legitimate.
"We made a request to the Wake Forest drinking survey to not use UNCP students' answers in the results because of this." Hayes said.
There hasn't been a reponse to the email yet, he said.
