Imagine that you’re a social scientist who wants to do ethnographic research on a terrorist organization. Your project might entail serious challenges to your own safety and the safety of your research informants. It’s the kind of research that would -– no getting around it — involve long hours of conversations with your university’s institutional review board.
So how would you feel if your IRB turned out to contain almost no scholars from the humanities or social sciences, and no one with international experience? Suppose that it were populated with people like an engineer who specializes in how drivers are impaired by tints, fog, and frost on their windshields?
At the Institutional Review Blog, Zachary M. Schrag of George Mason U. sketches such a scenario – and suggests that it violates federal law.
Schrag points out that federal regulations require IRB’s to contain members with “the professional competence to review specific research activities.” But Schrag argues that “researchers in the social sciences and the humanities are routinely denied that right.”
He cites a transcript of a recent conference on social science and terrorism sponsored by the RAND corporation. At that conference, a driver-impairment specialist at the University of Michigan complained that it is difficult to find people with appropriate expertise to serve on war- and terror-related IRB panels.
Schrag praises the Michigan engineer for his candor, but he also wonders if his anecdote is related to a recent dispute between Michigan’s IRB and the anthropologist Scott Atran.
(Photo by Flickr user Ctd 2005.)
