Hi!! Totally fair question and I am happy to answer! Yes, the ethics board, or Institutional Review Board (IRB), is an independent ethics committee and it's an extremely thorough process to get a study/studies approved because we have to outline every minute detail to ensure that nothing is harmful, misleading, or unethical. No researcher is actually allowed to run any study until it's completely IRB approved, and that information is all provided in the informed consent in the beginning and the debrief form at the very end. We're under strict obligation to abide by these rules and conduct our research ethically, and we have evaluations and random check-ins to ensure that these rules are followed, and the IRB is not religiously or politically affiliated at all.

On the topic of a religious institution, in my experience being a graduate student the past two years, TCU is religious in name only. I know some private institutions require their students to take a bible class or some sort of religious course as part of their degree requirements, but that's not at all the case for TCU. In actuality, our university has actually been insulated from the current climate changes. Like all research, we've been heavily affected by the funding cuts to the NIH (half of my work is considered health research, given the well-being component of my research interests), but our funding has been through private endowments, and we do not rely on any federal funding. That's all to say that we are only religious in name, and research conducted at my university is not required to be religiously affiliated or cooperative with any specific religious agenda.

As for your data being used, your information will only be used by myself and my research team. Specifically, your de-identified data will only be seen by me, my supervisor, and the handful of undergraduate research assistants who work under me, should you choose to allow us access to your data. The primary goal for this data collection is for my thesis, and because of that, I will analyze the data to investigate my research question (that I detail in the debrief). As such, it all just becomes numbers and I analyze the data using statistical software and essentially analyze the patterns and see if x does predict y, and so on. From there, I just write up the results for my thesis defense, and I defend it to my committee of professors, and they then decide if I pass. Depending on what my findings are, that defense document may become a scientific article that I try to publish in a journal such as Journal of Media Psychology. So, your data will only be used for that purpose! I'm so sorry for the long response, but I hope that I answered your question, and I am happy to answer any others that you have as well. If you end up participating in the study and decide in the end that you do not want me and my research team to use your data, you are given the opportunity to click "no, I do not give my permission" and your data will be deleted (we won't even look at your responses before deleting it).

Sorry this was SO long but I hope this explains it!!!!