Home > HCAS > HCAS_PUBS > HCAS_JOURNALS > TQR Home > TQR > Vol. 19 > No. 51 (2014)
Abstract
Institutional Review Boards (IRB) were instituted to protect the rights of research participants and due to past (and at times egregious) practices committed in the name of research. We question whether the IRB is currently overstepping its bounds into the domain of the researcher. We illustrate possible ways in which the IRB subtlety and not so subtlety challenge faculty professionalism and limit faculty research independence, highlighting some instances in which qualitative research topics bump up against boards that mistrust or misunderstand the nature of qualitative research. Using case study vignettes from five universities, our concerns focused on mission creep and potentially legitimating censorship. Areas of mission creep can include institutional reputation, methodological design, and chilling/legal language verses accessible language. In addition we consider multisite studies and when committees focus too much on form rather than content.
Keywords
HumanSubjects, IRB, Institutional Review Board, Ethics, Academic Freedom, FacultyProfessionalism, Qualitative Research
Publication Date
12-22-2014
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
DOI
10.46743/2160-3715/2014.1413
Recommended APA Citation
Musoba, G. D., Jacob, S. A., & Robinson, L. J. (2014). The Institutional Review Board (IRB) and Faculty: Does the IRB Challenge Faculty Professionalism in the Social Sciences?. The Qualitative Report, 19(51), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2014.1413
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Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies Commons, Social Statistics Commons