Comments on: Using informed consent forms in fieldwork

By: Some practical notes on ethics applications « Culture Matters

Some practical notes on ethics applications « Culture Matters — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 06:27:14 +0000

[...] consent. This is a major issue with ethnographic researchers, as posting by Rena Lederman and Alex Golub, personal discussions with other researchers have really highlighted for me, and ongoing [...]

By: Rex

Rex — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 04:11:22 +0000

Interviews were “on the record” in the sense that I will quote my interviewees word for word, but their identities will remain anonymous — so my letters were essentially similar to the form I linked to above. My letter was reviewed by IRB prior to my research.

By: Zachary Schrag

Zachary Schrag — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:37:33 +0000

I’m glad your IRB treated you well. I’d still be curious to see one of the letters you sent. Since you say the interviews were “on the record,” I assume you did not promise anonymity, as required by the sample social-science letter. Did you use the oral history letter, or write a new one yourself? If the latter, did the IRB review it prior to your research?

Zach

By: Rex

Rex — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 18:04:20 +0000

I’m very lucky — my IRB office was quite good about the process and have different language for different kinds of languages. Here’s their sample social science letter:

http://www.hawaii.edu/irb/download/documents/soc_sci_con.pdf

By: Zachary Schrag

Zachary Schrag — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 12:50:00 +0000

I’d be interested to see the exact language of the consent forms that your IRB recommended. Oral historians have no complaint about the concept of consent forms for interviews, in part because we like to archive our interviews, and that takes some kind of copyright permission. But IRBs concerned about 45 CFR 46.116 may insist on language better suited to a medical experiment, such as a statement of risks and benefits or a promise that the interviewees “may discontinue participation at any time without penalty or loss of benefits to which the subject is otherwise entitled.”

Did your IRB ask you to include any language that you considered inappropriate?

Zach

By: Rex

Rex — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 19:18:22 +0000

The issue that has been increasingly on my mind is: given that these forms are going to be (as Fuji puts it) ‘in your fieldwork bag’ how does using them in interviews then feed back not just on the interviews, but on all other sorts of interactions that you will have with your informants? This is particularly important since, it seems to me, the stuff that_isn’t_ interviews will be as important or more important than formal interactions.

The answer to the question really depends on where you work — Fuji’s comment is a great example of that. I think the key thing is that the letter disambiguates issues of privacy in the realm of formal interviews, and this then creates an awareness/demand that issues of privacy be disambiguated in all the OTHER domains that you will share with your fieldwork community: “she asked me to sign a form about this interview, and now she is shouting me drinks at the bar — what is the status of the dirt I am dishing her now?”

This means that being an anthropologist is a bit harder because the bar is set higher — but it is probably a good thing in the end since (obviously) people SHOULD know whether drinks at the bar are going to show up in your ethnography or not. The key thing is — like I said in my post — to work the letters into the process of your arrival in the field so that you and everyone else feels comfortable.

For instance, you may want to spend a lot of time discussing your project with people and give them a chance to know you before you move on to something more formal. This is good advice for lots of things besides just IRB sheets — often times it not until half-way through your fieldwork you finally hit on the people who will end up being closest to you.

The other option would be to introduce them very early about do interviews about a trivial or noncontroversial topic so that people have a chance to try out the form in a low-stakes way.

I’m sure that there are lots of other options, and that a good deal depends on the anthropologist and the community they are studying with. Obviously if you are an unpleasant person it doesn’t matter how long it takes for you to establish ‘rapport’ since you’re never going to!

By: Fuji

Fuji — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 14:31:03 +0000

When I did work in a village in China, I tried to make sure I got some kind of IRB permission, especially in terms of my use of pictures for publications. I always explained verbally what I was doing there, and after a month or two, everyone in the area knew what I was doing – it actually helped my research, since people would come to me to tell me if there was a funeral or wedding (since this is what my neighbors concluded was important to my research), and they also came to me with their own “data” such as their own videotapes of funerals.
But in terms of getting signed permission sheets, that was harder. I went through the local political hierarchy to do this (at that time, there was no village head in this area; the pastor of the Catholic Church in this Chinese village seemed to fulfill this function, along with a party secretary), and the pastor insisted that he had the authority to allow me to do the research and take photographs. He knew that I had already gone through the various levels (national, provincial, municipal, county, and township – at the municipal level on down, each involved a welcoming banquet and lots of drinking!), since I had an official temporary household registration. Bureaucratically, this would seem to not fit most IRB standards, but it in essence was the local version of IRB approval; in fact, for survey distribution in the 1990s, the Peoples Republic of China research procedures were much tighter than American IRB standards. I figured that as long as my process did not violate AAA ethical standards or local standards, then I fulfilled the spirit of the human subjects research restrictions.

By: L.L. Wynn

L.L. Wynn — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 03:15:01 +0000

Thanks for the post, Rex — my graduate students’ methods class is talking about IRBs and such this week and I’ll suggest that they read it, along with Rena’s interesting musings. There was an unfinished thought in the third-from-last paragraph: “I’m sure if I was asking for more prolonged commitments on their part.” … ? Care to finish it?

By: Nancy

Nancy — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 17:50:05 +0000

Funny, I was just thinking about the whole issue of informed consent. When I did my M.A. research, I was talking with two main groups of people: Natives and non-Natives. With non-Natives, I didn’t feel awkward at all asking them to sign a consent form since my interviews with them seemed to “naturally” take on a more business-like flavour, even though my interviews were more discussion style, unstructured and informal. However, when I had these same kinds of discussions with Native people, I felt more awkward because adding a business-like component to the dialogue seemed to put a kind of wedge in our relationship.

Anyhow, I’m currently planning for PhD work in the same location except that this time my research will be community-based and will have to do with young Natives to drink. Informed consent with people who are intoxicated much of the time has its own set of complications and I’m still trying to work all that out.