Oh, dear. This week was an experience. The assignment was to begin conducting target market research, and since the primary target audience for my project is children between 2 and 9 years old, there are limitations and extra precautions that must be adhered to. This is not really a problem in general, but it makes the entire process more time consuming. Add to this, the continuing pandemic and the challenges that has been causing, and gathering my data for this week has been stressful.
Since I had to have data this week, I took a bit of a shortcut and took a stroll through the local children's library and asked kids and their parents questions that would help me know a little bit about my target audience's reading habits and any suggestions they might have for my own project. After explaining to the librarian what I was doing and why, I had some lovely conversations with parents and children who were excited to help. Then...
I approached a woman wearing a name badge. I figured she must work in the library. I explained my project and asked my questions. She seemed responsive, but then when I asked for her first name or initial (which was on her badge) she huffed off. Ten minutes later, she informed me she'd "checked" (with whom? Not sure, because I'd already cleared this with the librarians) and I was "not to continue" due to "privacy concerns". While the woman was correct that there are special procedures for research involving children, my general questions, with no identifiers except first name was not a violation. However, I stopped as I didn't want to be ejected from my favorite library.
When the time comes for prototype testing, I will have to follow the correct procedures for obtaining IRB permissions for working with underage subjects, which, once again, isn't terrible to do, but is time consuming.
