Much of what anthropologists do in doing ethnography falls well outside the purvue of research and more in the area of “preliminary investigation.” There is a lot of guesswork and friend-making and question asking that comes to naught as we go through the motions of starting a project, even after we have “gone to the field.” I find that my students and colleagues are too willing to define everything they do, from emailing a potential informant to videotaping a interview full of personal questions as research. Since IRB’s are concerned primarily with tangible forms of harm, I recommend that anthropologists should be to. Thus, your research protocol should be specific about the precise kinds of data and information you expect to record and analyze– and should leave out everything else. This may sound obvious, but given our generally hyper-ethical tendencies, I think it is more common than not that anthropologists, especially grad students, are too concerned about whether simply emailing an informant, or knocking on someone’s door constitutes research. If you don’t have a strictly defined protocol for doing so, then it probably doesn’t…

2. Fill out forms meticulously and consistently.

90% of the problems my students and colleagues encounter is in not being careful to fill out forms precisely, to answer all the requested questions, check all the boxen, and limit answers to practical, detailed, protocol-oriented answers (and not how your research will ultimately prove the Rex Golub was wrong wrong wrong!). This may seem obvious as well, but bureaucracies demand administrative ascesis, and creative forms of resistance to standardization gain you absolutely nothing in this case. Anwering questions concretely, in detail, and briefly allows your form to be quickly processed by overworked IRB minions, instead of throwing up red flags immediately…