Comments on: Ethnography and the IRB

By: Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » IRBs, once more with feeling!

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 16:41:45 +0000

[...] Just got my most recent issue of American Ethnologist which contains a great array of papers and commentary (an “AE Forum”) on the problem of IRBs in ethnographic research. From what I can tell, the articles all take a pretty hard line on the intrusion of the “biomedical model” and its inappropriateness for ethnographic research. Articles by Rena Lederman, Daniel Bradburd, Richard Schweder, and a great article by ethnographic sociologist Jack Katz, whose work I often use in my Fieldwork Methods class. I’d love to have a wide-ranging discussion of these issues on Savage Minds, as I also have strong opinions and experience with IRBs… but the issue is available only to AAA members through Anthrosource. Cf. the previous post. [...]

By: Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » Community Consent

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 02:50:23 +0000

[...] Yesterday, William Hipwell gave a talk at my department about “Research Ethics and Aboriginal Peoples.” I won’t go into the details, but the emphasis was on the importance of informed consent. I was reminded of our recent discussion on SM about “anthropology and the IRB” and, indeed, some of those issues came up in discussion. The point I raised, however, was slightly different and came from my recent work in India. The issue there is that while we have the full consent of those we are working directly with in the film, the concept of “community” and who has the power to provide consent on behalf of the community (as opposed to individuals) is one of the things at stake. [...]

By: madisonian.net » IRBs, Ethnography, and Blogging

madisonian.net » IRBs, Ethnography, and Blogging — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 21:43:24 +0000

[...] The conflict between social science research methods and the goals of IRBs has been the subject of recent blogospheric commentary at Savage Minds. The American Anthropological Association even has a formal statement. I want to raise a related question. [...]

By: Zoe

Zoe — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 21:39:11 +0000

I know it’s a different country with different legislation and all, but the same ass backward processes underwritten by concerns about liability neo-liberal audit that have nothing to do with ethics…or people for that matter. Anyway… here at the University of Toronto Gavin Smith is now chair of our ethics review board and he’s come up with some ways of incorporating participant observation into the ‘traditional’ ethics protocol. I’m in the middle of the process myself and have am finding this stuff particularly useful. You can check out the details at http://www.research.utoronto.ca/ethics/eh_policy.html
Also, one of the ways that folks in the dept have gotten around the written consent thing before is by arguing that it is culturally inappropriate, which may or may not work for you depending on who you do your FW with.

PS
anyone have an informed consent script they’d be willing to share? Mine keep coming out like total legalese or like they were written for, say, the target audiance for teletubbies.

By: TechnoTaste » Ethnography + IRB = Ugh!

TechnoTaste » Ethnography + IRB = Ugh! — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 19:06:33 +0000

[...] This post from Savage Minds, now several weeks old, has an interesting discussion of trying to get ethnographic research approved by institutional review boards. The comments are a particularly good read. At Berkeley we certainly have our share of issues with IRB, but at this point I think they’re more about institutional process than about ethnography in particular. I find that this is one of those frustrating situations where I can see both sides of the story. On the one hand, the University needs to protect itself from liability – its interest is certainly in protecting research participants, but perhaps moreso avoiding the consequences of our country’s litigous ways. And who can blame them? The world is full of irresponsible researchers. [...]

By: K Fosher

K Fosher — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 19:18:48 +0000

I conducted my dissertation field research among responders and security planners in a U.S. city from June 2001 through December 2003. The initial IRB issues (“and this is how I plan to reduce risk for the nice men with guns….”) were strange enough. After 9/11 when I needed to renew, I just had to cross my fingers and hope I had given them enough butt covering material to let me keep going. Although my research subjects were not vulnerable in the traditional sense, political and security concerns made them reluctant to sign informed consent forms. Practical concerns made it impossible to use the verbal consent method.

I am willing to share my IRB applications, discusss the revisions, and how I handled it in the field. My contact info is on my website.

By: Rebecca Goolsby

Rebecca Goolsby — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 15:31:07 +0000

IRBs vary greatly and there is at present no realistic “check” on their power. The AAA guidelines are not particularly helpful, either; they are vaguely worded and so broad that they are generally unhelpful when an anthropologist is trying to educate an uninformed Board. I’ve been a member of an IRB, I’ve headed an IRB and I now fund programs that (of course) require IRB permissions, and when dealing with their bureaucratic requirements, one must realize that there is legally actionable consequences that the university will be liable for should they approve a request that turns out to be less than ethically pure. Good, clear guidelines from the AAA that are more up to date than the current ones would help these committees (and the researchers, and ANTHROPOLOGY) beyond measure. Anyone try to do post-911 research on Islamism? Anyone successful at getting IRB approval to interview failed suicide bombers in foreign locales? What about approvals for studying IRC/web-chat, blog participation, forums? IRB protections in such instances are completely in a muddle. The law is not going to catch up with these problems anytime soon. It’s high time that AAA updated its guidelines to effectively assist researchers to determine what is and is not ethical in the modern world.

By: Anthro Grad Student Guy

Anthro Grad Student Guy — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 03:21:21 +0000

I think one of the main problems is that in some cases the members of HSIRB boards do not see ethnography as a valid form of research. For my master’s thesis, at my current institution, I was able to go through the expedited review process because I met certain criteria under the various laws that govern HSIRB. However, I have heard horror stories of people who have to go through the full review process and submit their HSIRB proposals to the full board. In many cases, this resulted in critiques of ethnography as a methodology and in some cases theoretical ideas (e.g. Asking one student how they would “measure” the homosexuality of informants.) There seems to be a strong assumption among HSIRB boards that ethnography is not objective and/or that subjective research is in of itself a bad thing. This seems to lead some HSIRB boards to assume that since enthnography is “flawed” because it is subjective then this methodology could lead to harm to subjects. This leads to the unfortunate situation where some HSIRB boards end up critiquing the entire basis for much anthropological methodology and theory instead of actually looking at the specific, unique circumstances of an individual research project.

By: Ozma

Ozma — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 21:43:35 +0000

well, that’s probably true — but the more it’s true the more you (and by “you” I mean “the practice of ethnography by anthropologists”) are screwed. So what can you do but give the optimistic approach the old college try?

By: ckelty

ckelty — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 21:11:06 +0000

Ozma, in my optimistic moments I totally agree… I’d love to believe that my Overlords are good-natured and well-meaning and we can find ways to actually protect people. The rest of the time, I worry that they are do-gooders with a very narrow idea of what it means to protect people, and a deep, irreconciliable suspicion of any kind of research that does not follow those ideas. I think they are motivated by fear of failing–but I also think they are motivated by other, more insidious things, like following what they perceive to be “best practices” in the IRB world, which are “best” only because lots of people follow them; or by fear of lawsuits.

By: Ozma

Ozma — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 18:48:47 +0000

I doubt it is bureaucratic intimidation — more likely covering their behinds and wanting to be on the right side of history (no-one wants to be the review board that approves a modern Tuskegee experiment). So I would imagine the most useful strategy would be to talk about how the work of the IRB is ultimately about substance, not process — are people appropriately protected? How do we guarantee the protection of human subjects in a thoughtful rather than a formulaic manner? The 7 minute document Adam mentions having been forced to read by his IRB board could actually be a *great* illustrating anecdote for you Chris: clearly it didn’t do any research subjects any good at all or protect them from anything; it sounds rather more like those statements read out by the Spanish in the Americas before undertaking conquests. Making that kind of point could get your new colleagues on your side — I would guess their main motivator is the fear of failing at an important task.

By: ckelty

ckelty — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 14:51:40 +0000

These are great (thanks Noah, Claire, and Adam!), but unfortunately not re-assuring. Adam’s experience is precisely the kind of bloody-mindedness that I am trying to prevent here– because in practice its never going to happen, and if the only point is bureaucratic intimidation, well….

By: Adam Henne

Adam Henne — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 03:51:18 +0000

My experience was that written informed consent could be waived at the IRB’s discretion, assuming that I could reasonably claim adverse circumstances as described elsewhere here – nonliterate population, extreme mistrust, etc. In place of a form, I was told to create a script for obtaining a verbal waiver of signed consent. This was not, I discovered, a set of notes for how I might explain what I was doing to a potential research participant – it was a literal word-for-word script that I would be required to read to each participant in order to obtain said verbal waiver of signed consent. My script went back for several rewrites, including corrections of my grammar in Spanish by the IRB officer. Let me just say that in practice, getting a research participant to sit still through the 7-minute reading of my script proved challenging.

By: Claire

Claire — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 02:23:30 +0000

Me again, sorry forgot to add (since this might be of general interest and since no one’s brought it up yet) there are provisions for not getting written informed consent. It’s in the legislation, and I can look it up if you can’t find it. The upshot, at least as far as I know, is that if informed consent is deemed necessary, it must be in writing, but if the research is exempted from a full review (as linguistic fieldwork tends to be) the legislation is not quite a problematic.

By: Claire

Claire — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 02:14:43 +0000

I’m a linguist but we have the same problems with anonymity and informed consent. I work in Australia and so far I have received exemptions under Title 45 CFP 46, in part because I follow guidlines for research set down by the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, and the Land Rights Act (1978, if memory serves). The Canadian SSRC has a set of guidelines which I have also referred IRBs to in the past, and to the AAA’s code of ethics.