IRBs and Social-Science Research
2 July 2008 at 9:53 am Peter G. Klein 1 comment
| Peter Klein |
Most US research universities have an Institutional Review Board, or IRB, tasked with supervising “human-subjects” research. Unfortunately, the performance of the typical IRB is nothing short of disastrous, as we’ve noted before. IRB officials are trained to work with the physical and biomedical sciences, and have little knowledge of social-science research, though their mandate usually covers all research done at the university.
The July 2008 issue of Political Science & Politics, published by the American Political Science Association, contains a symposium on “Protecting Human Research Participants, IRBs, and Political Science Redux.” As editor Robert J-P. Hauck notes in his introduction:
By the 1990s, “IRBs had expanded their mission to include all research, not just research funded by the federal government, enhancing their scope of authority while slowing the timeliness of reviews. Similarly, and with the same result, IRBs were evaluating secondary research as well as primary research. Although the federal legislation provided for a nuanced assessment of risk, the distinction between potentially risk-laden research necessitating a full IRB review and research posing minimal or no risk that could be either exempted or given expedited review was disappearing. The length of the review process threatened the beginning or completion of course work and degree programs. IRBs were judging the merits of research projects rather than the risks involved. This trend was especially problematic because representation on many IRBs was skewed toward biological and behavioral scientists often unfamiliar with the methods and fields of political science and the other social sciences. And the list went on.
In the years that followed there have been several efforts to reform human subject regulation. . . . In the face of these and other efforts, are IRBs better able to effectively and efficiently protect human subjects in social science research?
Judging from the comments of the symposium authors, the answer is no. Now as in the past, IRBs have no consistently applied metric for measuring risk and corresponding levels of IRB review. Mitchell Seligson, Felice Levine and Paula Skedsvold, and Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea confirm that the review process has not and perhaps cannot accommodate survey methods and ethnographic and field research. The pace of the IRB review process continues to hinder undergraduate and graduate empirical research. IRBs’ rigid interpretations of requirements produce logically inconsistent directives such as when researchers are told to destroy data they diligently collected and anticipated sharing in order to protect research subjects’ anonymity (Seligson 2008; Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2008; and Levine and Skedsvold 2008).
The pointer is from Zachary Schrag, who promises to comment on each article in the symposium.
Entry filed under: - Klein -, Education, Institutions, Methods/Methodology/Theory of Science.
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K.W. Taylor | 9 July 2008 at 6:25 pm
The situation described sounds like a disaster. As a chair of a non–biological/medical research ethics board or REB as we call them in Canada, I can say from experience that our setup seems to sidestep most of these problems. First we have different REBs for different research ‘areas’ and REB members are chosen from the disciplines the REB is designed to cover. For example, our PSREB deals with live human subject research from Psychology, Sociology, and Social Work, so these members have the knowledge and experience necessary to deal with psych and soc and social work research, without imposing standards from biology and medicine.
The vast majority of our reviews are expedited and we attempt to get these reviews completed and back to the researchers in 15 working days, a standard we have held to since the start. The odd full review application for those research projects dealing with children, vulnerable subjects or dangerous situations of any kind are likely to take longer.
The issue of data storage and sharing is usually permitted if large data sets are ‘anonymized’, or the subjects of studies with small numbers of participants have given their permission for storage or archiving of their contributed information. Participants retain the right to cease participation at any point, and can have their information ‘pulled’ from an archive if they change their minds. They also retain the right to cease participation up to the point of the publication of research results, but of course not after publication.
Members of REBs can question the merits of the research, but that is rarely done unless there are flagrant and egregious departures from sensible scientific practice. Where there is strong disagreement between researcher and reviewers on any point, we can call mutually agreed on outside experts for their judgement.
Our system is nowhere near perfect, of course. We are now in the process of setting up a system of research monitoring to assess if the researchers keep to what they promise regarding ethical treatment of live human subjects. We’ll see how that works out. Best of luck in getting your system reformed.