Research Involving Personal Information

If your research involves collecting personal information of individuals or organisations there are a couple of additional requirements that you must keep in mind.

What is personal information? See the definition of personal information in the University’s Protection of Personal Information (Privacy) Policy.

When the ASSAf POPIA Code of Conduct for Research is accredited, researchers will also have to comply with the most recent draft.

Here is a video explaining what the Code of Conduct is about.

Some additional requirements that you must keep in mind:

• Obtain ethics approval before you commence your research.
• Submit a Data Management Plan with your research proposal. If your research is high risk, you must also obtain approval from the Research Data Management Committee. The assessment of whether your research is high risk is included in the research proposal template and checklist.
• If you are conducting a survey with University staff, students, alumni or other stakeholders you must get approval from the Survey Coordinating Committee. You must do this before you obtain ethics approval.

Important: If your research involves animals or is health research, you must also take note of the information on those pages. You may need approval from multiple ethics committees.