My own campus IRB is very good at being aware of diffrent standars for, say, oral history and journalistic types of research, and while I have some some questionnaires, that research never came until full IRB review.
Sure, I get that the research will often be rubber-stamped, or they'll look at your project and say, "We don't need to approve this. Go forth!" Like, you usually don't need IRB approval for a retrospective analysis of a published data set.
But in the back of my head when I was writing all this was the sad fact that I'm unaffiliated, and if I want to do human-studies research, I probably would never be able to get it published, because...I'm unaffiliated, and no IRB approval will be forthcoming. So nobody will publish my research.
I perceive this as a huge, huge problem. If research becomes so academic-ized that people cannot participate, it's a sad day for research. I get how in the sciences this is far more of an issue—people working out of homemade labs in their garages are unlikely to have the infrastructure and equipment to get that vaccine to human trials! And vaccines to human trials are just the things that IRBs were invented to oversee, not fans creating ticky-box questionnaires on LJ, you know?
So my concern is really more that the academy is insinuating itself everywhere and insisting on a level of oversight that is in fact inappropriate, mostly to cover their asses, but this is resulting in a quashing of valid, relevant research.
no subject
Sure, I get that the research will often be rubber-stamped, or they'll look at your project and say, "We don't need to approve this. Go forth!" Like, you usually don't need IRB approval for a retrospective analysis of a published data set.
But in the back of my head when I was writing all this was the sad fact that I'm unaffiliated, and if I want to do human-studies research, I probably would never be able to get it published, because...I'm unaffiliated, and no IRB approval will be forthcoming. So nobody will publish my research.
I perceive this as a huge, huge problem. If research becomes so academic-ized that people cannot participate, it's a sad day for research. I get how in the sciences this is far more of an issue—people working out of homemade labs in their garages are unlikely to have the infrastructure and equipment to get that vaccine to human trials! And vaccines to human trials are just the things that IRBs were invented to oversee, not fans creating ticky-box questionnaires on LJ, you know?
So my concern is really more that the academy is insinuating itself everywhere and insisting on a level of oversight that is in fact inappropriate, mostly to cover their asses, but this is resulting in a quashing of valid, relevant research.