Another IRB gripe

charlie-tango:

paolaandfrancesca:

charlie-tango:

Historians, English majors, etc. never go through the IRB even though they are supposed to.

Last spring in my religion class, one of our classmates from the History Department described an elaborate interview project he was working on for his dissertation. “Wow, how the hell did you get that through the IRB?” “Uh… what is the IRB?” I wish I was kidding. So I can’t go pull a book off a shelf and use PUBLICLY AVAILABLE DATA and this guy can go meandering around in someone’s personal letters and interview people to kingdom come? Ugh.

For what it’s worth, that wouldn’t fly here. We can’t even let students in writing classes to do the traditional “ask a family member about their experiences and write it up” assignment unless they and we go through an IRB training process. We’ve got a large group of folklorists, so we’re on their radar, and we can get in serious trouble if we don’t follow the rules.

That’s nice to hear, but it isn’t common. I did a little survey in the history class I took, only the HDFS and Sociology kids knew what the IRB was. History kids were clueless. Most English and History scholars are exempt anyway because they study dead people, but I still wish they had to wait 8 weeks before starting their projects.

As long as psychologists have to, I guess I can live with some disciplines skating by. Ugh, psychologists.

I’d never heard of the IRB until I got here…but then, the people I study aren’t just dead, they’re very dead. I still feel I have ethical responsibility to do right by them, but it’s not the same kind of ethical responsibility as working on living people.

Our grad student TAs know all about the IRB though because the writing program threatens them with the wrath of god if they assign anything without going through the proper channels. It might also have something to do with the emphasis on multi-media in those classes—a lot of them have students do something with cameras that I take it requires they obtain the consent of whomever they photograph?

I didn’t deal with this until I started moving into researching Twentieth Century topics where I have living informants. I know few historians who need IRB because most are not working with living informants or artifacts. As for taking 8 weeks, I’ve never had a university take that long for a human subject project that just involved interview.

(Source: charlietangofoxtrot)

2011.07.25 6:52pm ∞

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