Appendix C: Informed Consent Form Virtual Focus Groups

American Institutes for Research

RECS Research Use Pilot Study

Informed Consent – Focus Groups

Introduction and Purpose: The American Institutes for Research (AIR) is an independent, nonprofit research organization. The Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF) Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) is partnering with AIR to gain an understanding of the utility of the content shared during the Research and Evaluation Conference on Self-Sufficiency (RECS) 2024. As a part of this work, we are conducting virtual focus group discussions with individuals who attended RECS 2024. AIR will use the information gathered from the focus groups and other sources to support OPRE's efforts to plan for future conferences.

Data Collection. AIR will be conducting focus groups with individuals, like yourself, who attended RECS 2024. We anticipate each focus group taking up to 90 minutes. Topics of the focus groups include your goals for attending the conference, learning experiences at the conference, and your use of research and information shared during the conference.

Privacy. We will keep all information obtained in these focus groups private to the extent allowable by law. We will use the information only for the purposes of this study. We will not use your name in any reports and will not attribute any quotes to individuals.

Benefits and Risks of Participation. The information you share will help inform OPRE’s efforts to plan future conferences. Though we ask all other focus group participants to keep the conversation private, there is some risk that someone in the focus group will discuss what you share with others.

Freedom to Withdraw. Your participation in this focus group is completely voluntary. You may pass on responding to any question or withdraw from participating at any time, without penalty.

Permission to Record. We would like to record the focus group discussion. The recording allows us to check the accuracy of our findings. No one outside of our research team has access to the recording. We save the recordings on a secure server that only AIR team members can access. All recordings will be destroyed after the completion of this study.

More Information. For more information about this study, you may contact Gee Rege, the Task Lead at AIR, at RECS@air.org. For questions regarding your rights as a subject participating in this research, please contact AIR’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) at IRBChair@air.org or toll free at 1–800–634–0797.

Note: According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, an agency may not conduct or sponsor, and a person is not required to respond to, a collection of information unless it displays a valid OMB control number. The valid OMB control number for this information collection is #0970-0531 and the expiration date is 9/30/2025.