Institutional Review Boards

Institutional review boards (IRBs) are official university bodies in the United States that are authorized to evaluate research proposals to ensure ethical research practices. Comparable bodies exist under different names in different countries. For example, in the United Kingdom they are called research ethics committees, whereas in Canada they are referred to as research ethics boards. The justification for such boards is derived from some of the past century's most notoriously unethical research endeavors. The most egregious of these abuses occurred in the natural sciences, but high-profile instances of ethically questionable research led to IRBs also having jurisdiction over social science research. Qualitative researchers have been critical of this development. They have pointed out that the IRB process is based on alien assumptions about the nature of research and knowledge production, resulting in rules for ethical research conduct that at times do not mesh with the pragmatics of qualitative research.

Today IRBs have jurisdiction over all university-affiliated research in most Western countries. Faculty members and students cannot conduct research without ethics approval from an IRB. Those who do not secure such approval can be sanctioned by their universities, and universities are also accountable to [Page 440]federal authorities if unapproved research is conducted under their auspices.

The emergence of these boards is usually justified with reference to “research” that Nazis conducted on unwilling research “participants.” In trying to prevent such practices, IRBs are guided by three dominant assumptions and a series of practical policies that follow from these assumptions. The first assumption is respect for human dignity. This manifests most prominently in the notion that individuals should formally consent to participate in research in full awareness of the harms and benefits that might be associated with such research. The second assumption is balancing of harms and benefits. This entails having researchers adopt the least risky research designs while trying to maximize benefits to participants and society. The third assumption is justice. This suggests that the risks or benefits of research should not fall disproportionately on any particular group and also that the ethics review process should itself be procedurally fair.

Qualitative researchers have been among the most vocal critics of such boards, accentuating that IRBs often conceptualize “research” with reference to a classic laboratory setting that does not cohere with the real-world practicalities of much social scientific research. Rules about securing informed consent, for example, are often impractical or unworkable in participant observation settings. Requirements that researchers set out their research questions in advance so that they can be evaluated by IRBs can also clash with the emergent nature of much qualitative inquiry. Such problems are compounded by the fact that IRBs across the United States have occasionally interpreted the official rules in quite different ways.