PREAMBLE: We are conducting a study of Canadian bicycle delivery workers, "Health, Safety and Precarity in Toronto Bicycle Delivery Workers", to learn more about your health and safety while on the job and to identify useful targets for prevention of injury and disease among delivery workers. Anyone 18 years or older who has worked in the last 12 months in a job delivering food, goods, or documents in Canada is eligible to participate. We are attempting to recruit up to 1000 participating bicycle delivery workers.The study researchers are Dr. Anne Harris and Dr. Ian Young (School of Occupational and Public Health, Toronto Metropolitan University) and Dr. Tracy Kirkham (Occupational Cancer Research Centre, Ontario Health).

WHAT YOU ARE BEING ASKED TO DO: Participation entails completion of an online survey, which asks questions about your past and current work in bicycle delivery, the equipment you use to do your job, hazards you experience on the job, and your relationships with companies who employ you/contract your services. We will also ask demographic information to help understand more about bicycle delivery workers in our region. Responses are voluntary, you will have to agree to “submit” responses for these to be collected. We expect the survey will take about 30 minutes to complete.

POTENTIAL BENEFITS: Your participation in this study will help our research project’s understanding of health and safety in bicycle delivery workers, a first step in the objective of finding new ways to protect worker health. We are unable to guarantee any direct benefits from participation in this study.

POTENTIAL RISKS: There are no known risks to you in completion of this survey. We recommend selecting a survey location with visual privacy. If any questions make you uncomfortable, you can skip or decline any questions you do not wish to answer. You can also stop participating at any time by closing your browser before submitting the survey. Withdrawal from the survey will not influence future relations with Toronto Metropolitan University, the Occupational Cancer Research Centre, or study investigators.

YOU CAN COMPLETE THE SURVEY ANONYMOUSLY: The data for this survey will be analyzed anonymously and you can complete the survey without providing any contact information to us. Contact information is not required to complete this survey. We will request your contact information for two entirely voluntary purposes: 1) To enter you into the incentive draw and 2) If you agree we can contact you to invite you to future studies. This information will be stripped from your study responses, we will never analyze your data provided in the survey in connection to your contact information.

YOUR INFORMATION AND DATA WILL BE PROTECTED BY THE RESEARCHERS: This survey uses Google Forms as a component of the G-Suite services contracted to Toronto Metropolitan University. Although your Internet Protocol (IP) address can be tracked through the survey platform, the researcher/s will not be collecting this information. Your IP address may be observed only to ensure that one individual is not completing the survey multiple times. As a United States of America (USA) company, may be subject under USA Freedom Act to provide data access to USA authorities. Google holds data in cloud-based servers, with access to data from this survey restricted to the researcher’s account (Dr. Harris).

To further protect your information, contact data stored by the researchers will be encrypted and/or password/protected. We will only ever analyze anonymized data. Anonymized data will be stored on investigator devices secured with passwords (both device and files) and in cloud data services protected with 2 factor authentication. Publications from the data will include collective information (i.e. aggregate data). Your individual responses (i.e. raw data) will not be shared with anyone outside of the research team. When the survey is completed, the researchers will download the data from the survey platform and delete survey responses from the Google Forms server.
The researchers will destroy contact information provided for the sole purpose of incentive draw on completion of that draw, will keep contact information provided with consent to be contacted for follow-up studies for up to 5 years after the study is over and will keep anonymized survey response data for up to 10 years follow completion of the study. Data will be destroyed by deletion from all servers and storage media at this point.

INCENTIVE FOR PARTICIPATION: We will hold a voluntary draw for one of five $50 gift e-cards. The researchers will randomly select 10 participants who completed the survey before December 31, 2022, and who consent to the draw. The odds of winning will depend on the number of consenting submissions received. We anticipate probability of winning to be no less than 1/100. We will contact winners by the email addresses provided for this purpose. We will offer winners a choice of Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) or Amazon. The draw will be held no later than January 31, 2023. Please note that participants who wish to withdraw from the survey will have to skip to the end of the survey to receive the incentive draw option.

PUBLISHING OF STUDY RESULTS: We will summarize and prepare peer-reviewed research article(s) to report the study findings. The research team will also post public facing summaries of the research findings (after publication) linked to the News page of the Faculty of Community Services, Toronto Metropolitan University. https://www.torontomu.ca/fcs-news-events/news/. Participants seeking updates on research findings are encouraged to reach out to the principal investigator, Dr. Anne Harris (anne.harris@ryerson.ca), but must note that this may result in identification as a research participant.

YOUR RIGHTS AS A RESEARCH PARTICIPANT: Participation in research is completely voluntary and you can withdraw your consent at any point by closing the browser. However, submitted surveys cannot be withdrawn. If you wish to have your data withdrawn after submission of the survey, you may contact the lead investigator (Dr. Anne Harris, contact information below), but please note that anonymity may not be preserved in this case. You can also skip any questions that you don’t feel comfortable answering. You do not give up any legal rights by agreeing to participate in this study.

QUESTIONS: If you have any questions about this research survey, please contact Dr. Anne Harris (anne.harris@ryerson.ca; 416-979-5000 xt553109). Participants directly contacting the investigator may no longer be anonymous.

This study has been reviewed and approved by the Toronto Metropolitan University Research Ethics Board (REB# 2020-250). If you have any questions about your rights or treatment as a research participant in this study, please contact:

Toronto Metropolitan University Research Ethics Board

Email: rebchair@ryerson.ca

Phone: (416) 979-5042

Address: Office of the Vice-President, Research & Innovation

1 Dundas Street West, 11th Floor

Toronto, Ontario M5G 1Z3

Web: http://www.torontomu.ca/research