The Expanding Purview: Institutional Review Boards and the Review of Human Subjects Research

Institutional Review Board Use of Outside Experts: What Do We Know?

Institutional review boards (IRBs) are permitted by regulation to seek assistance from outside experts when reviewing research applications that are beyond the scope of expertise represented in their membership. There is insufficient understanding, however, of when, why, and how IRBs consult with outside experts, as this practice has not been the primary focus of any published literature or empirical study to date. These issues have important implications for IRB quality. The capacity IRBs have to fulfill their mission of protecting research participants without unduly hindering research is influenced by IRBs' access to and use of the right type of expertise to review challenging research ethics, regulatory, and scientific issues. Through a review of the regulations and standards permitting IRBs to draw on the competencies of outside experts and through examination of the needs, strategies, challenges, and concerns related to doing so, we identify critical gaps in the existing literature and set forth an agenda for future empirical research.

Oversight: Community vulnerabilities in the blind spot of research ethics

In spite of many and varied concerns that the processes of institutional ethical review are flawed, cumbersome, and in need of reform, these processes do provide effective protection in certain situations for individual research subjects, researchers, and the institutions from which the researchers venture to conduct their fieldwork. Many in the social sciences have argued that the ethical protocols that the researcher must observe are designed to protect against the potential dangers of much riskier biomedical research, and that social research is, by and large, harmless. Although there is some validity to that argument, in this paper, social research is assessed not in terms of its risks to the individual participant, but to communities. By examining the protocols of the Belmont Report, the Institutional Review Board, and the American Sociological Association’s “Code of Ethics” and ethical review, this paper discusses some of the major blind spots in the ethical review of social science research, applying the analysis in particular to the case of indigenous communities, who have historically sustained significant damage from academic researchers against which no standardized institutional review could have protected them. The paper covers the history and parameters of these three ethical review institutions, identifies shared blind spots, and discusses the consequences of these blind spots for indigenous communities, ending with some suggestions of ways to address the problems in the system.

Ethics Regulation in Social Computing Research: Examining the Role of Institutional Review Boards

The parallel rise of pervasive data collection platforms and computational methods for collecting, analyzing, and drawing inferences from large quantities of user data has advanced social computing research, investigating digital traces to understand mediated behaviors of individuals, groups, and societies. At the same time, methods employed to access these data have raised questions about ethical research practices. This article provides insights into U.S. institutional review boards' (IRBs) attitudes and practices regulating social computing research. Through descriptive and inferential analysis of survey data from staff at 59 IRBs at research universities, we examine how IRBs evaluate the growing variety of studies using pervasive digital data. Findings unpack the difficulties IRB staff face evaluating increasingly technical research proposals while highlighting the belief in their ability to surmount these difficulties. They also indicate a lack of consensus among IRB staff about what should be reviewed and a willingness to work closely with researchers.

IRB reformation: is unfettered access the answer?

The purpose of this column is to consider if research using only an interview should be evaluated by an institutional review board (IRB) or if it may be considered exempt. A review of atrocities committed by researchers both in the biomedical and psychosocial domains will be considered as a backdrop to the discussion. Issues that plague IRBs will be examined including lack of transparency, overreach of the process, and stipulations that change the nature of research. Finally, recommendations for reform will be entertained.

Is mandatory research ethics reviewing ethical?

Review boards responsible for vetting the ethical conduct of research have been criticised for their costliness, unreliability and inappropriate standards when evaluating some non-medical research, but the basic value of mandatory ethical review has not been questioned. When the standards that review boards use to evaluate research proposals are applied to review board practices, it is clear that review boards do not respect researchers or each other, lack merit and integrity, are not just and are not beneficent. The few benefits of mandatory ethical review come at a much greater, but mainly hidden, social cost. It is time that responsibility for the ethical conduct of research is clearly transferred to researchers, except possibly in that small proportion of cases where prospective research participants may be so intrinsically vulnerable that their well-being may need to be overseen.

MRI research proposals involving child subjects: concerns hindering research ethics boards from approving them and a checklist to help evaluate them

The process of research is often lengthy and can be extremely arduous. It may take many years to proceed from the initial development of an idea through to the comparison of the new modalities against a current gold-standard practice. Each step along the way involves rigorous scientific review, where protocols are scrutinized by multiple scientists not only in the specific field at hand but related fields as well. In addition to scientific review, most countries require a further review by a panel that will specifically address the ethics of the proposed research. In Canada, those panels are referred to as Research Ethics Boards (REB), with the United States counterparts known as Institutional Review Boards (IRB).