Here are some example of common activities that would NOT qualify as research as defined by OHRP, along with alternative characteristics that might change the project into OHRP-defined research:

  • You are teaching a class and want your students to collect some data that they will use for a class assignment.
    • This activity is not research. While your students are presumably collecting data systematically, they will not be publishing or presenting their work; it will be used solely for a class assignment (e.g., presentation, paper).
    • NOTE: If your students think that they might present this data outside of the class situation, or publish it in some way, this might be considered research. Whether it is research or not would depend on the goals of the project (see definition of research and other examples).
  • You are teaching a class and will be having your students complete an activity that you designed to increase their learning. When the activity is over, you ask them to complete a survey assessing what they learned and their opinions of the exercise. You intend to use this data to further develop the activity for use in your classes in future semesters.
    • This activity is not research. While your assessment is systematic and designed for a particular purpose, the outcome of this project is only for use in your own classes to improve your students’ experiences and their learning.
    • NOTE: If you intended to publish or present information about this activity to colleagues in your field, this would be considered research because you are now expecting the outcomes with your students to generalize to other people and settings.
  • You are in charge of a particular organization on campus and would like to survey students about their opinions about some aspect of campus life (e.g., diversity). The data will be used to develop programs on campus to address any identified issues.
    • This activity is not research. Again, although your assessment is systematic and designed for a particular purpose, the goal of this project is to identify an issue on campus (i.e., internally) so that that issue can be addressed. Data from the project will not be presented outside of campus or published, and therefore does not contribute to generalizable knowledge.
    • NOTE: If you developed a program that addressed one of the identified needs and wanted to assess the program to determine whether it was successful so that you could share it with colleagues at other institutions, you would be conducting research.
  • You are doing an oral history project where you intend to document a life event of particular importance (e.g., talking to a group of people who founded a particular church about their motivations, talking to individuals about their experiences in a particular group or organization, talking to people who witnessed a particular historical event). In this case, your primary goal is to document the experiences of these people and to record them so that they are preserved for others.
    • This activity is not research because the outcome of this project is historical, and is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge. Your primary goal is to document a particular history or experience.
    • NOTE: If you were trying to uncover specific factors that might have led to one outcome occurring rather than another with an eye toward identifying these factors for others (e.g., this particular business collapsed because of internal management errors like X, Y, and Z), you are conducting research. In this case, you are trying to learn lessons from the particular group that you are studying with the hope of generalizing those findings to other people and/or organizations.
  • You are working in a particular church to develop a program that meets some identified need (e.g., welcoming new members, bringing lapsed members back into the church).
    • This activity is not research because the outcome of this project is specific to addressing a need in one particular church, and is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge.
    • NOTE: If you want to generalize about the effectiveness of your designed program beyond your location to other churches or organizations (and therefore would presumably be comparing implementation of the program to situations in which no program was implemented), you would be conducting research.