Combined Participant Information Sheet and Consent Form for Anonymous Online Surveys for Adult Participants



Study Title: Child sexual abuse trials; the juror’s experience. – Questionnaire survey
Researcher:  Stephen Hanvey
University email: S.R.Hanvey@soton.ac.uk
Ethics/ERGO no:  100211
IRAS no: N/A
Version and date:  V1  16 Dec 2024

What is the research about?

My name is Stephen Hanvey and I am a PhD student studying for my doctorate with the Law School at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.
I am inviting you to participate in a study regarding the experience of members of the public called to do jury service, who find themselves sitting on a trial examining allegations of child sexual abuse. This is of course a challenging task, and how jurors feel about it has never been researched.  It is not about the experience of child sexual abuse itself or asking about your or anybody’s personal hurt. The study is only concerned with jurors’ thoughts and feelings about these particular trials, whether the allegations tried were recently made and brought by children, or from years ago, so brought by adults. The study is just looking at the experience of being called to do this particular jury service, about the experience of hearing the evidence presented, and how jurors feel and think about how they have been managed and supported before and during the trial. There are questions too about the support and after-care that was available for you once the trial was over. The questions will therefore be about your thoughts on being called to jury service, how it felt being at court, about the experience for you of hearing and listening to the evidence, the preparation provided beforehand, support from court staff and judges during and after the trial, recognizing there may have been both difficult and painful times in the trial, but also more positive aspects.  ( Please note, it is illegal to mention anything, said by anyone from the periods when the jury are all together and deciding the verdict, the so-called ‘deliberation’ phase. This means there will be no questions or invited comment about your or other jurors’ thoughts or observations when together regarding the evidence, guilt or otherwise, and it should not be offered or given.  

This study was approved by the Faculty Research Ethics Committee (FREC) at the University of Southampton (Ethics/ERGO Number:100211).

What will happen to me if I take part?

This study involves completing an anonymous online questionnaire which should take approximately 50 minutes of your time. The online questionnaire has been designed to be ‘live’ for completion for 24 hours, and if you need to go away for any reason and come back to it, that is fine. If you are happy to complete this survey, you will need to initial the individual consent requirements below to show you have read and agree them and tick (check) the box below those to show your consent. As this survey is entirely anonymous, the researcher will not be able to know who has participated, which trial they were on, when or where. 

Why have I been asked to participate?

You have been asked to take part because  you may have been a juror on a trial considering allegations of child sexual abuse, of recent harm, or as abuse inflicted many years ago and your participation would be invaluable for this study. It is therefore only for people who have served as a juror on such trials in England, Scotland or Wales and can provide their thoughts and memories of this specific trial category. It is hoped to have approximately 30 anonymous, returned questionnaires.

What information will be collected?

The questions in this survey ask for information in relation to your experience of being called to do jury service. This includes when you first received the summons letter, while you were at the court and after the trial had finished. It is therefore more about your impressions, memories and feelings of the whole experience.  You will not be invited to say anything about other jurors’ attitudes, nor what was said by anyone while the verdict was being considered – which would break the law if you provided anything about that. The questionnaire is a blend of some questions with multiple choice,  tick-box choices, and others asking for a few lines of written responses. The only information about you personally is your gender self-identification, age-group, ethnicity, employment status and whether you consider you have a disability. This is in order to give an approximate sense as to how reflective the responses may or may not be of the population, to contextualize the responses, but the answers cannot enable any identification. The only other personal question is a  ‘Yes / No’ option if you consider yourself to have experienced sexual abuse or unwanted sexual attention as a child or young person, but no details are needed or being sought.

Some of the survey questions contain textboxes where you will be asked to type in your own answers. Please note that to ensure this survey to be anonymous, you should not include in your answers any information from which you, or other people, could be identified.
After the introductory question to ensure your participation is appropriate, you do not have to answer all the questions if you do not wish to do so.