Chief Investigator’s / Supervisor’s Name & Title: Associate professor Sachiko Kinoshita
Participant Information and Consent Form – Online version
Name of Project: Rating of taboo words
You are invited to participate in an international multilaboratory study to investigate taboo words. The purpose of this study is to generate a database of taboo words in many languages that can be used by researchers worldwide.
The Australian part of the study is being conducted by A/Prof Sachiko Kinoshita, 9850 8004 and sachiko.kinoshita@mq.edu.au) of the Department of Psychology, and research assistance is provided by Hasibe Kahraman, Department of Cognitive Science, email hasibe.kahraman@mq.edu.au.
This is an online study. You are under no obligation to participate and will not be given the study URL until you have signed up for the study. In order to sign up for the study, you must agree to the terms of participation noted in the information and consent form. This includes not receiving credit for participation until the end of the experiment. You are free to stop the experiment at any stage; but, you will not receive credit for participating unless you complete the entire experiment. As a participant, you are obligated to read and follow the instruction given to perform the task; not following the experimental instruction jeopardises the quality of the research.
This study is part of a large cross-linguistic project aimed at studying taboo words. With taboo words we refer to those words that are offensive and thus sanctioned or restricted (both individually and institutionally) because their use might produce some harm. They include racial and sexual slurs, terms that are used to insult and marginalize specific target groups. If you feel that reading and rating these words is likely to be harmful to you personally, please do not sign up for this study.
Please note that conducting research on taboo words does not imply the researchers approve the real-life impact of these words. Quite the contrary, understanding the phenomenon in question is a necessary step to prevent or counteract potential damage caused by it. First of all, the inclusion of such words in a database on taboo words is a strong indicator that the use of such words is considered inappropriate by the speaker community. In fact, our database will provide a more comprehensive picture, since the words will be characterized via ratings on multiple dimensions, including their offensiveness and tabooness. Thus, the database will provide detailed information about which words are considered particularly problematic by speaker communities, and further allow for comparisons between different speaker populations (across languages and, in some cases, within the same language as spoken by different communities). This can for example raise awareness for social issues in cases where ratings from one community greatly diverge from others.
The survey will ask you to 1) provide demographic information (such as your age, gender, your native language and other languages you know, but not personal information that can identify you) and 2) rate taboo words on a number of dimensions such as valence (pleasant-unpleasant), offensiveness. By taboo words, we mean all those words that, in a specific cultural and linguistic context, are considered to be offensive, and thus sanctioned or restricted (both individually and institutionally) because their use produces some harm. They include racial and sexual slurs.
The demographic data and the rating data will be saved on separate files on a password-protected server hosted by the ZDV (Zentrum für Datenverarbeitung/Center for Data Processing; which is responsible for the university’s computing infrastructure) at the University of Tübingen, Germany. On this server, it is ensured that the data cannot be accessed, especially not via the WWW. Access to the data is limited to persons directly involved in the research. No individual will be identified in any publication of the results.
If you terminate your research participation due to adverse circumstances, please contact the researcher.
As a research participant you are responsible for:
- Completely reading information and consent forms
- Carefully weighing the risks and benefits of participation
- Knowing when, where, and for how long participation is required
- Talking to the researcher when concerns arise
- Fulfilling the responsibilities as described in the information and consent forms
The ethical aspects of this study have been approved by the Macquarie University Human Research Ethics Committee. If you have any complaints or reservations about any ethical aspect of your participation in this research, you may contact the Committee through the Director, Research Ethics & Integrity (telephone (02) 9850 7854; email ethics@mq.edu.au). Any complaint you make will be treated in confidence and investigated, and you will be informed of the outcome.