You need ethics approval whenever your dissertation involves human participants, their identifiable data or their tissue — interviews, surveys, focus groups, observations, experiments. You do not usually need it for research built entirely on published literature or properly anonymised public datasets. Approval must come before you collect anything, and at undergraduate level it is normally handled inside your own department.
That is the short answer. The longer answer matters because the ethics process is where more undergraduate timelines quietly collapse than anywhere else: students design a project in October, discover in February that it needed approval they never sought, and lose data they cannot use. This guide covers what triggers review, who actually reviews it, what goes in the application and how long to allow.
What kinds of dissertation actually need ethics approval?
The trigger is not whether your topic is sensitive. It is whether your method involves people. A dissertation on a highly charged subject built entirely from published sources typically needs no approval; a cheerful ten-question survey of your coursemates almost certainly does. Lancaster University’s guidance for its humanities and social science departments puts the rule plainly: undergraduate coursework and dissertations “that involve the generation of data with human participants need to be ethically approved before human participants are approached and before any data is generated”.
In practice, expect to need approval for interviews and focus groups, questionnaires and online surveys, experiments and usability tests, systematic observation of identifiable people, and any reuse of data that could identify someone. Expect not to need it — or to need only a declaration form — for literature-based projects, doctrinal legal analysis, work with genuinely anonymous published statistics, and textual or historical analysis of public documents. Every institution draws these lines slightly differently, which is why the first document to read is not a website like this one but your own module handbook.
Who reviews an undergraduate application?
Almost never a grand university committee. UK universities run tiered systems, and undergraduate projects sit at the bottom tier, reviewed close to where they are supervised. At Lancaster, responsibility for reviewing undergraduate and taught master’s projects “lies within the Departments”. Many institutions run a two-track system inside that tier: a light-touch or proportionate route for low-risk projects, often reviewed by the supervisor plus one other member of staff, and a full committee route for anything involving vulnerable participants, sensitive topics, deception or identifiable personal data.
The practical consequence is good news: a low-risk undergraduate application is usually reviewed by people who know your course and can turn it around in days or a few weeks — not the months a full university committee cycle can take. The equally practical consequence is that the definitions of “low-risk” vary between departments in the same university, so the label on your project is decided by their form, not your intuition.
What goes into the application?
Names and forms differ; the anatomy barely does. A typical undergraduate ethics application contains:
- The application form itself — your research question, methods, who your participants are, how you will recruit them, and what you will do with the data. Your supervisor normally has to review or countersign it before it goes anywhere.
- A participant information sheet (PIS) — plain-English answers to what the study involves, that participation is voluntary, how data will be stored and for how long, and who to contact with concerns.
- A consent form — tick-box statements the participant signs, mirroring the information sheet.
- Your instruments — the questionnaire, interview schedule or task description, because a committee cannot assess risk in the abstract.
- Recruitment materials — the poster, email or message you will actually send.
Two details are worth stating because they generate most of the rejections. First, the data-management answers have to be specific: where files will live, who can see them, when they will be deleted. “On my laptop” is a wrong answer everywhere. Second, if you recruit friends and coursemates, the application should address the pressure-to-participate problem directly rather than hoping nobody asks.
When should you apply, and how long does it take?
Work backwards from your data-collection window. A proportionate departmental review commonly takes one to a few weeks; anything routed to a fuller review takes longer, and every round of requested revisions adds another cycle. Submitting in the same week you hoped to start interviewing is how a fortnight of recruitment disappears.
The one rule with no exceptions: approval comes before data collection, and retrospective approval is generally unavailable. Data collected without approval is unusable, however good your intentions were. Getting the design settled early — including how many participants you actually need — is what makes an early application possible, because the committee is approving a specific plan, not an aspiration.
Does a supervisor’s approval count as ethics approval?
No. Your supervisor’s sign-off is a required step in the process, not the process. Equally, ethics approval is not a quality judgement on your research design — a committee can approve a study that is methodologically weak, and your marker will not treat the approval letter as evidence that the design was good. The design still has to be defended in your methodology chapter, where the ethics section describes what you did and why, not merely that a form was signed.
What about research involving the NHS?
Here the rule is national, and it is absolute. The Health Research Authority states that “standalone research at undergraduate level that requires ethics review and/or HRA and HCRW Approval (or devolved administration equivalent) cannot take place”. Standalone means a project you design, submit and conduct yourself, even with supervision — and the HRA is explicit that for undergraduate courses the supervisor should take the chief investigator role, which does not rescue an ineligible project. If your plan involves NHS patients, service users or staff as participants, it needs redesigning, not persistence.
The HRA’s own suggested alternatives are secondary research such as literature, scoping or systematic reviews, and health research that does not involve patients, service users or NHS staff as participants or their identifiable data. Group projects led by a course leader are treated differently. The compliance side of this — including which survey tools your university will even let you use for health-adjacent topics — is covered in our guide to survey platforms for UK student dissertations.
What can you do with no approval at all?
A great deal, and choosing it deliberately is a legitimate design decision rather than an evasion. A literature-based dissertation, a documentary or policy analysis, work with published aggregate statistics — these routes carry no participant risk and no approval clock. If ethics timing threatens your schedule, it is worth an honest conversation with your supervisor about whether a review-based dissertation answers a question you care about just as well. Weigh it while you are still choosing and narrowing your topic, because the method decides the ethics burden, and the topic decides the method.
Practical next step
Draft the ethics documents in the same week you draft your research questions — the information sheet and consent form force you to describe your study concretely, which improves the design itself. If the writing around it is the bottleneck, you can plan and draft your dissertation in Tesify around your own approved design — 100% written by you, with the structure handled.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need ethics approval for an anonymous online survey?
Almost always yes. Approval attaches to research with human participants, not to whether you record names. Note also that a survey collecting several demographic details from a small population may not be genuinely anonymous, and your application should say how you have handled that.
Do I need approval for a literature-based dissertation?
Usually not, though some departments ask every student to complete a short ethics declaration confirming that no participants are involved. Check the handbook rather than assuming silence means exemption.
Can I start recruiting participants while my application is under review?
No. Approval must be in place before participants are approached, not merely before data is recorded. Advertising the study is part of the research activity your application covers.
What happens if I collected data before approval?
Tell your supervisor immediately. In most institutions the data cannot be used and retrospective approval is not available. The honest recovery is a redesign, and supervisors have seen it before.
How long does undergraduate ethics approval take?
Low-risk proportionate review at departmental level often takes days to a few weeks; fuller review takes longer, and revisions restart the clock. Build a month of slack in front of your data-collection window and you will rarely regret it.
Does interviewing my own family or friends still need approval?
Yes. They are human participants, and the closeness of the relationship raises its own issues — perceived obligation to take part, difficulty refusing — that your application is expected to address.
Do I need a DBS check to interview adults for my dissertation?
Not for research with adults who are not in a vulnerable situation. Projects involving children or vulnerable adults raise safeguarding requirements and usually a higher tier of review; many departments steer undergraduates away from such designs entirely.
Does using social media posts as data need ethics approval?
Very often yes, and departments differ sharply on it. Public visibility is not the same as consent to be studied, and identifiable posts are personal data. Ask before you scrape anything.
Is ethics approval the same as GDPR compliance?
No. The ethics review checks your plan against research-ethics principles; data-protection law applies to you separately whenever you process personal data. In practice the application forces you to answer the main data-protection questions, which is one reason committees ask them.
My ethics application was rejected. Is my dissertation over?
No — rejection at this level nearly always means revise and resubmit, with the reviewer telling you exactly what to fix. Treat the feedback as free supervision on your research design and turn the revision around quickly.