Europe and North America Regional GCED Network

instead of dividing the work into two subteams.
5.6. Research ethics procedures
The plan for this study has been reviewed by a Research Ethics Board at the
University of Alberta. The interviews have been administered on a secure Zoom
link and not recorded. Instead, participants' responses were documented in a
survey tool. Thus, there was very limited risk to organizations as participants in
this study. The team has taken care in storing the information provided. While the
respondents' personal information will be reported anonymously, the names of
all organizations will be made public in the research through the visual mapping
of networked relations and in the discussion of the European – North American
network. This information could benefit all organizations working in GCED in the
region.
The respondents' participation was voluntary, and even if organizations chose
to participate, they could change their minds later. After that, the research
team began to aggregate the data; it is no longer possible to remove specific
information.
All data will be stored in a safe, password-protected, encrypted computer file
for 5 years. It will only be used by members of the study team for a report for
the Asia Pacific Centre for Education and International Understanding and for
the work of the principal researchers leading the study. In addition, findings
will be presented in a report for organizations working in GCED and academic
writing and presentation to the international academic community.
When invited to the interview, all respondents received a copy of the ethics
information and consent form so that they could confirm their acceptance of the
ethics guidelines for the research.
5.7. Data collection procedures
The data collection team consisted of six researchers: two senior faculty and
four research assistants, three located in Europe and three in North America.
Data collection procedures were fully recorded in a vademecum (Appendix
D) for reference by all researchers to ensure consistency and to preserve
methods for further research. All documents were shared digitally, allowing
ongoing collaboration and transparency. Here, we outline our main choices and
procedures in data collection.
5.8. Designing the questionnaire
We developed the questionnaire across multiple iterations to ensure that it
captured both the attributes of and relations among organizations in support of
our social network analysis and according to the methods described above. The
creation of the questionnaire has been inspired by a survey instrument used in
policy network study (Gronow & Yla-Anttila, 2019).
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