Best Anti-IRB Article You’ll Read Today

24 April 2008 at 12:30 pm Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

It’s Zachary Schrag’s “How Talking Became Human Subjects Research: The Federal Regulation of the Social Sciences, 1965-1991,” forthcoming in the Journal of Policy History.

In universities across the United States, institutional review boards, or IRBs, claim that they have the moral and legal authority to control the work of researchers in the humanities and social sciences. While IRBs may claim powers independent of federal regulations, they invariably point to these regulations as a key source of their authority. This article draws on previously untapped manuscript materials in the National Archives to trace the history of the federal regulation of social science research. Officials raised sincere concerns about dangers to participants in social science research, especially the unwarranted invasion of privacy as a result of poorly planned survey and observational research. On the other hand, the application of the regulations to the social sciences was far less careful than was the development of guidelines for biomedical research. Regulators failed to define the problem they were trying to solve, then insisted on a protective measure borrowed from biomedical research without investigating alternatives.

See also Schrag’s valuable Instituitional Reveiw Blog.

IRB oversight is particularly strong at the University of Missouri, across all departments, partly the result of a federal investigation in 1999 that came down hard on the medical school. One might wonder what this has to do with social-science research, but there you go.