Hi James M. Clark Professor of Psychology 204-786-9757 204-774-4134 Fax [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>> David Epstein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 14-Oct-07 12:15:43 PM >>> On Sun, 14 Oct 2007, Marc Carter went: > My major concern would be that the IRB is stepping into issues that > don't concern it -- it's not the job of an IRB to meddle with issues > of design that do not impact the rights and welfare of the > participants. I'm on an IRB, and I side with the school of thought that says a badly designed study is less ethical than a well-designed study because, as the science deteriorates, the risk:benefit ratio approaches infinity. So I have no problem with an IRB's dispensing scientific suggestions. I see it as another layer of quality control, and I'm grateful if it improves one of my own studies. JC: I could not disagree more with David on this. First, once you allow an IRB to intrude into methodological questions, you necessarily introduce the problem of different views about scholarship, including anti-quantitative views among some advocates for qualitative scholarship. You also open the door to any number of suggestions to "improve" the proposed research (e.g., alternative measures, alternative methods, different participants, ...). This is not the purpose of IRBs (assuming they have a legitimate purpose ... see next point). Second, The "risk" value in David's ratio for the vast bulk of psychological research is 0, if we properly define risk as the INCREASE in risk over and above what participants face in their everyday lives. Hence, there is no risk against which benefits must be measured. And benefits of course include teaching benefits when students are involved ... is an instructor correcting an error in design really as much of a learning experience as students going through the entire data collection and analysis process, only then to discover themselves the flaws in their research? David continues: However, in cases like this, where the IRB apparently doesn't know what it's talking about, I feel that there should be a mechanism available for a smackdown (or, you know, an appeals process, to phrase it more politely). The absence of such a mechanism was the subject of a fascinatingly bitter little symposium at this year's APA (presentation titles included "IRBs as Bioethical Industrial Waste for Both Research and Society"). JC: The absence of an appeals process is not the problem ... it is first the use of IRBs themselves for areas of scholarship that involve no risk above that met in participants' everyday lives, and second the extension of their powers to non-ethics matters like method. The claim that the flaw is the appeals process is like saying that the lack of an antidote is the problem when someone is going around poisoning people. And just try to say, no matter how politely, that some post-modernist or otherwise relativist faculty members from the humanities or social sciences (occasionally including psychology) do not know what they are talking about! Look for retorts including words and phrases like: eurocentric, hegemony, alternative ways of knowing, and the like. One faculty member in psychology has already been told by our IRB (different name here of course) to read some book on rather dubious modes of so-called scholarship (I'm reluctant to use the word "research") before re-submitting for approval. And if you were to use phrases like "doesn't know what it's talking about" (although I agree entirely with David's depiction), then you might also expect issues of respectful work environment to arise, another mechanism in academia for the unwarranted protection of weak, weak, weak (did I say weak?) so-called scholarship. Take care Jim ---
