When engaging with young audiences, there are additional considerations around data protection, safeguarding and user experience.
For people who are 13-18 years old, you may invite them to respond on Commonplace via the usual means. However, we recommend the following:
Create a dedicated project or tile for this purpose, in order to tailor your content for this audience.
You should consider using the Hidden Comments functionality which prevents responses from being published, so as to avoid the inadvertent publishing of any personally identifiable information. If collecting responses via Face to Face / Interview Mode, you can mark mark the contribution as hidden.
As is required on all Commonplaces, make doubly sure that you are not requesting any personally identifiable information in the survey, for example age, gender, email address, name, postcode, school year, school name, etc.
In addition, we recommend avoiding the inclusion of any demographic questions, in order to reduce risks of any unintended evaluation of answers, perhaps with the exception of an age question, so that you can confirm that your respondents are of the age you're expecting.
Both Commonplace and you, our engagement partners, must take extra precautions here. We reserve the right to take remedial action against any administrator or their employer who has not followed our guidance below.
Under 13s (before a child's 13th birthday) may only respond via Face to Face / Interview Mode. This is non-negotiable. The additional steps below are required.
A dedicated tile is required, although you may prefer to run a dedicated project in order to achieve the below more easily.
Train your surveyor(s) so that they have clear understanding of this document and guidance from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) available here.
The surveyor needs to read out a statement at the start of each interview that makes it clear that it is the survey and the privacy policy is designed in compliance with the ICO Guidance on GDPR and Children (above). We recommend you carefully consider the language used so that it is informative and understandable to the audience. The ICO requires writing clear privacy notices for children so that they are able to understand what will happen to their personal data, and what rights they have.
Ensure that your surveyor(s) has rehearsed on you and other people who are not Under 13 so that you have confidence in the process.
The surveyor(s) must never collect the email address of the person who is under 13. A checkbox is available in Face to Face / Interview Mode to skip the email address collection. Click the 'No email provided' checkbox on every interview.
The surveyor(s) must always mark the contribution as hidden, unless parental consent has been received. A checkbox is available in Face to Face / Interview Mode to prevent publishing of the contribution. Click the 'Respondent does not wish to publish this comment' checkbox on every interview.
Parental consent is strictly required if you plan to publish the responses. In all cases parental consent is recommended, and especially if there is any risk of collecting data that personally identifies an individual. There are a few ways to make this work:
The surveyor(s) can ask a parent / guardian who is present with the child to confirm the identity of their child and provide consent on their behalf. We would always recommend that the parent / guardian provides proof, using a passport, health document or similar. You may wish to capture the document identification number in the demographic questions section to minimise risk and capture a confirmation of the paper consent. In addition, we recommend you collect the email address of the parent/guardian in case you need to contact them in future. As always, email addresses will never be published if collected using the standard email address capture step.
Before starting the survey process, your surveyor should send by email / post a letter to parents/guardians informing them of your intentions. You should provide a unique password or 6 digit code for each child you wish to interview. If the parent/guardian is not present at the interview, you could ask the child to provide you with the password or 6 digit code. It's useful to have the list of passwords or codes on the tablet device you are using for interview, so that you can verify the correct password. In addition, we recommend adding a question in the survey demographics questions that asks the surveyor to confirm that the code has been verified 'yes/no'. Any contributions collected without verification of parental/guardian consent should be deleted, such that it cannot be published, and ignored in your evaluation.
Other than a demographic question to verify that the parent / guardian consent verification was confirmed, you must not ask any demographic questions. You already know that your audience is aged under 13 and so do not record age or any other information, such as gender, email address, postcode, name, school year, school name, etc.
Still unsure about anything? There's lots more information here on the Commonplace Help Centre - alternatively, contact the support team and we'll be happy to help 👋
