Video Reflection

Hi! My name is, and I am a doctor of business administration student at Capella University. I am submitting my final institutional review board (IRB) submission to my capstone project about bridging digital leadership in U.S. finance.

The completion of the final institutional review board application is a very important step in the development of my doctoral capstone project. The title of my research study is “Bridging digital leadership gaps in U.S. finance: Training and change management. The IRB submission has detailed documentation that outlines the purpose of the need and the ethics of the investigation. The initiation of the application is with the problem of expert validation of my interview protocol. I have availed the services of three professional people, who helped me to assess my interview questions in the realms of suitability and effectiveness. The review panel will consist of one research methodology specialist and two specialists on the topic of digital transformation and organizational development. The critical evaluation process led to my interview guide improving tremendously since the process became more specific and in accordance with my research focus. My pre-test was also done to find out the practical issues that would be encountered in the real interview sessions.

To make the approach to recruitment transparent and reproducible, the IRB documentation is thoroughly explained. The technology of sampling will be aimed at ten financial services managers who will be qualified to the required standards. The predetermined standards would make sure that only qualified candidates are a part of the investigation. The criteria to be followed will include the participants being middle or senior management in the United States financial services organizations, having five years or more of leadership experience in the financial sector, being able to make strategic decisions connected with technology implementation, and providing informed consent to engage in the research study.

The screening procedure uses four close yes-or-no questions reflecting the qualification needs and allows efficient selection of appropriate participants. The recruiting will take place through my own professional and social media accounts, i.e., my LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, where I have people in my network as financial services practitioners. The sites will be my personal accounts, and therefore, no institutional authorization would be necessary to post recruitment material. The informed consent procedure is accorded a lot of consideration in my application. After confirming the eligibility of the potential participants, people will be given detailed consent documentation, but before scheduling interviews, they will be contacted using secure electronic mail. The consent form will include the purpose of the study, the voluntary nature of participation, the right to withdraw, the time commitment expectation, and data manipulation. The participants will have sufficient time of twenty-four hours to go through the document and pose questions in front of the managers, filling in the digital signatures with DocuSign. Sending of all the consent

forms is expected to be done electronically prior to the start of the interview.
Since interviews will occur via Zoom video conferencing at the location of choice by the participants, it is not applicable to the study in case of physical site permissions. The data collection becomes virtual and thus does not need institutional access approvals. About measurement tools, my qualitative approach will also be based on semi-structured interview questions instead of quantitative measurement tools; therefore, the validation of the instruments will be done following alternative protocols that apply in qualitative research. I also do not know about any conflict of interest that would interfere with the research integrity. Personally, professionally, or financially, I have no relationship with the potential study subjects. My recruitment plan does not specifically apply to any person I know, and further reduces the number of bias and coercion issues.

The issue of data security was given a lot of consideration during my application. Several safeguarding policies guarantee the protection of information and research data of the participants. Any recordings and transcripts of the interviews will be encrypted with the highest-level protocols to avoid unauthorized access. I can obtain the data only during the research, as I am the main researcher. The confidentiality of the participants will be ensured by making sure no personal identification will be attached to the information in the research, and the data will be stored in various encrypted files. Interview records will be made on off-site, password-protected hard drives rather than cloud-based. The digital files will be duplicated to other external storage devices, encrypted, and kept in my office at home. We will use alphanumeric identification numbers in describing the participants in our research, such as FM01, FM02, and so on, instead of using actual names. The files containing the lists of participants that would be matched with the codes would be encrypted files, which would be stored in separate files, not in the interview data, which would be locked up in a storage area within my home office.

Information will not be physically transferred between sites, as it will be stored on personal external drives and not moved physically. Personal storage devices in my residential home office will have all the research files on digital transformation stored safely and encrypted. The approach eliminates the threats of data transfer while maintaining the appropriate degrees of security. All the research records would be kept for seven years after the study had been completed, as required by the university policy and federal regulations. Systematic destruction of data will be done after the required retention. The tapes of the interview will be destroyed and permanently deleted on an encrypted storage device with the help of secure deletion software. Cross-cut shredding devices will be used to destroy any physical documents. Impact methods will be used to destroy external storage devices to confirm complete distortion, and it will not be possible to recover any information.
The fact that the most important aspects have been reported in a detailed manner is evidence that my application is prepared to go through the IRB review. The expert validation system affirms the suitability of interview questions. The recruitment strategy will provide efficient and moral avenues of reaching qualified people. The informed consent procedures take proper care of the autonomy of participants and offer voluntary participation. There were data security practices that placed participants in a number of confidentiality tiers. A combination of all these aspects could be termed as the entirety of ethics that protects the human subjects and permits the realization of meaningful scholarly research in the area of developing digital leadership in financial services. Based on my IRB application, I meet all institutional requirements and regulatory aspects and am well-positioned to be approved and begin the important research.