The Brave New World of Research Surveillance

Abstract

Institutional review boards (IRBs) were created to review biomedical and psychological research involving demonstrable risk to human participants. During the past half decade, however, many campus IRBs have begun to review humanities and social science research, thereby substantially expanding their mission and effectively imposing on faculty moral and ethical standards inappropriate to historical research. Moreover, IRBs have traditionally reviewed research plans, not potential publications. But the only way for IRBs to guarantee adherence to their standards for human conduct campuswide would be to exercise prior restraint on publication. That would seriously undermine academic freedom.

Qualitative Research in Question

“…I was surprised at how easy it was, how smoothly I could perform the docile-bodied student. Nelson's (2004) description of the IRB hierarchy comes to mind:…”

Questioning Professional Autonomy in Qualitative Inquiry

“…Scholars have argued that IRBs ought to distinguish between physical and non-physical harms in biomedical, behavioral, and social-science research. This is due to social-science research more often involving paper-pencil tests (i.e., rather than drug trials), and to social-science research being dialogue-oriented rather than clinically oriented [9], [10]. Oakes has plotted a chart of possible harms to human subjects, which range from physical harms, such as death, in medical research, to non-physical harms, such as annoyance, in journalism research [41].…”

Ethical Review and Children's Research in Ireland

“…medical and natural science research, on the one hand, and social science research, on the other, with particular attention to qualitative research methodologies (azar, 2002;Connolly and Reid, 2007;Ells and Gutfreund, 2006;hemmings, 2006;hesse-Biber and Leavy, 2006;Jacobson et al, 2007;Lincoln and Tierney, 2004;Nelson, 2004;Ramcharan and Cutcliffe, 2001;Stevenson and Beech, 1998;Tolich and Fitzgerald, 2006). an additional challenge that faces RECs in relation to ensuring review expertise and adequacy is the challenge of combining competence-building and continuity of membership with the avoidance of the establishment of unquestioned and potentially biased review routine.…”

“…One significant factor that determines review load is the definition of which kinds of research require ethics approval. Criticism has been levelled at the expanding remit of ethics review especially over the last decade and the perception that a problematic 'IRB mission creep' has occurred is quite common (Gunsalus et al, 2007;haggerty, 2004;Nelson, 2004).…”