Consent form

CDC OneLab Focus Group Informed Consent Form

Background and Purpose

The purpose of the focus group is to gather feedback from CDC OneLab members to identify opportunities to improve OneLab’s development and dissemination of relevant and timely education and training resources. Also, to understand the overall OneLab user experience and the experience of each OneLab element to better serve the training and development needs among laboratory workforce and testing community. Your insights will help us improve the overall OneLab in the Training and Workforce Development Branch (TWDB).

Your participation in this focus group is completely voluntary. You can refuse to participate with no penalty or negative results. You can choose to respond to specific topics during our conversation and not to others. You can also choose to stop participating entirely at any time.

Procedure

The focus group will last approximately 1 hour and 47 minutes via Zoom and will be facilitated by a CDC contractor or CDC Federal Employee. The focus group will include no more than a total of 5 laboratory professionals (i.e. laboratory general staff, laboratory managers, supervisors and/or directors). Please share your perspectives by unmuting your line or using the “raise hand” function, and mute when you are not speaking.

Confidentiality

We greatly value your insights, and we want to get it right. For this reason, we will take detailed notes during our session. In addition, to make sure we fully and accurately capture our discussion, we would also like to digitally record it. If there is any point during the focus group where you would not want us to record, we will stop or pause the recording.  

Please be advised that the nature of focus groups may prevent us from guaranteeing complete confidentiality during the session. However, we will take every precaution to maintain confidentiality of the data. The recordings will only be used to ensure transcription accuracy and not be shared with anyone other than the Data and Evaluation unit and CDC contractors that are directly working on this project. All recordings will be permanently deleted after the transcriptions are completed. Any information shared during the focus group will only be used for the stated purpose above and will not be attributed to you nor your organization. The feedback from all focus group discussions will be used in aggregate only. No individual names or other identifying information will be kept or linked to specific responses. Participants are reminded to respect the privacy of your fellow participants and not repeat or share what is said in the focus group to others. 

Contact Information

If you have any questions or concerns about this focus group, please contact Breyanna Mikel ([email protected]).

By checking "I agree" I acknowledge that I understand the above information and agree to participate fully under the conditions stated above.

☐I agree

☐No, I choose not to participate in the focus group

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Sample Focus Group Questions

• How engaged with the OneLab initiative are you all?  

• Can you all describe how you became a part of the OneLab community?  

• What is your experience with sharing information, events, or resources about or from the OneLab initiative to those in your personal or professional network?  

• How has your experience participating in the OneLab initiative affected the way that you all conduct your work or your professional network, if at all?  

• How would you describe your overall experience with OneLab?  

Focus Group Informed Consent 2