The Institutional Review Board (IRB) and Faculty: Does the IRB Challenge Faculty Professionalism in the Social Sciences?

On February 25, 2011, Associate Professor Jin Li sued Brown University for excluding her from using data that Li collected over a three-year period which she believed was under Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval (Jin Li v. Brown University in Providence in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, 2011). Li sued Brown on five counts, including overreach of the IRB authority, failure to have minority representation on the board, and lack of due process in appealing their decision. Li's main complaint was that the institution was "barring her from using her own data because she paid her human research subjects different amounts of money based on their economic status," (Barrett, 2011) which was a change from the original IRB proposal. She made the change because it was costing participants more than the original amount to participate. With this decision, Li used the kind of emergent mindset that typifies qualitative researchers in the field--"an openness to contingency, shifting slightly in order to respond to participants needs" (Leisey, 2008, pp. 422-423). However, changes require an additional review by the IRB, and Li did not seek such approval. Ultimately, Li and Brown University reached an out-of-court settlement and requested a case dismissal. Li did violate the human subjects' policies of the institution because of her disparate compensation, yet the consequences seemed disproportionately severe. While the Li case is a dramatic and somewhat complicated example, this examination leads us to question whether IRBs may be slowly and quietly limiting faculty research and applying a single standard to a diverse body of research. It appears there is often only one standard penalty for all IRB violations: the researcher cannot use the data. Some violations need greater penalty and others a lesser penalty. Further for our purposes, the Li case illustrates the power imbalance between the researcher and the Review Board. Li felt the need to engage the courts in order to reach a satisfactory resolution. The intent of this paper is to demonstrate ways that IRBs can be overly intrusive in faculty research and challenge research faculty professionalism. In raising these issues, we ask the reader to consider whether these are disturbing patterns or a few rogue IRBs. One of the university's most important commodities is its reputation. Therefore, care should be taken to guard the high ideals for which a university stands. Research ethics is a serious responsibility, and the Institutional Review Board's (IRB) role is to protect and minimize risk to human subjects. Yet, what are the boundaries of that role, and is the IRB responsible for broader institutional ethics, institutional reputation, and/or ethical issues that arise for researchers in the field that are not a part of the original IRB (Blee & Currier, 2011)? A brief review of the history of the abuse of human subjects (Lemonick & Goldstein, 2002; Schrag, 2010) makes it apparent some form of peer oversight is absolutely necessary. For example, since 1951 Henrietta Lacks' cancer cells have been used in thousands of research studies without her or her family's knowledge. In an unprecedented agreement reached in the summer of 2013, the National Institutes of Health and the Lacks family established a plan to protect the family's genetic privacy and for future oversight of use of the cells in research (Vergano, 2013). When has the IRB overstepped its bounds into the domain of researchers' academic freedom and ethics? It is important to understand at some level, the IRB is us, the faculty. United States IRB boards are comprised of a faculty peer review committee along with full time staff and/or legal counsel. If faculty panels are reviewing one another's research, why is the approval process sometimes adversarial? Should not collegiality prevail? Some may rightly argue for a critical challenge of the IRB bureaucracy or a complete overhaul (Hammersley, 2009); here we focus more on corrections to the system. …