Do Community Members Have an Effective Voice in the Ethical Deliberation of a Behavioral Institutional Review Board?

Abstract

Using concepts and methods from technical and professional communication and linguistics, the authors conducted an observational study of the voice of community members (CMs) in the deliberation of a behavioral institutional review board (IRB). In the discourse of deliberation, they found that CMs had an effective voice in constructing the compliance of individual research protocols under IRB review. But they also found that CMs had an ineffective voice in representing their African-American community, particularly in their efforts to advocate for more consideration of minority research sites and subjects and a fuller consideration of minority community attitudes.

Concomitant Ethics: Institutional Review Boards and Technical and Professional Communication's Social Justice Turn

“…99-100). Indeed, TPC researchers concerned about such materials can communicate with their IRBs, and some TPC researchers have not only developed unique templates and tools (Wright, 2012) but studied IRB operations (Barton et al, 2018).…”

Text at Scale: Corpus Analysis in Technical Communication

“…This type of work already exists: Godwin Y. Agboka (2021) used a quantitative content analysis to point out the scope of the problem of using the word "subject" to describe the human participants of technical communication research. Likewise, Barton et al (2018) used content analysis to identify the circumscribed ways that community members contributed to research ethics discussions concerning their neighborhood. While these analyses were not corpus analytic, they were large-scale approaches to text analysis that can reveal patterns of activity in text (e.g., portrayal and participation) that point toward topics of interest, findings, and suggestions for action.…”