Obtaining Active Parental Consent via Telephone in Adolescent Substance Abuse Prevention Research

There is ongoing concern among prevention researchers about how best to obtain parental consent for participation of minors in prevention trials involving confidential, but not anonymous, data collection from longitudinal panels of subjects. The requirement of written active parental consent leads to an inordinate level of case loss and very high costs in follow-up efforts to obtain consent. Passive consent procedures have been questioned and denied by many institutional review boards. This article reports on one solution to this problem-the acceptance of verbal active parental consent, obtained by telephone as a follow-up to mailings requesting written consent. Using this approach, we were able to contact a parent for 96% of the nearly 3,000 students being recruited for the Healthy for Life evaluation.