Washington Monthly - September/October 2014 - 63

Since IRBs often only meet monthly, multiple revisions
make the process drag on. Sue waited half a year for clearance. When Northwestern University professor Brian Mustanski sought clearance for a foundation-funded study of
young members of sexual minorities, multiple rounds of
IRB review consumed ten of the twenty-four months of
funding. Fortunately, Mustanski was able to persuade the
IRB to retract its demand for parental permission; had he
confined his study to youth willing to involve their parents,
it would have skewed his results.
Other researchers are less successful. Graduate student Sarah Young tried to get approval to interview Chinese mothers about their views on the one-child policy. The
women were willing, and she had scholars at a Chinese university willing to host her. But after three months of unreturned emails and phone calls, and finally an in-person
meeting with an administrator who belittled her knowledge
of Chinese history, Young abandoned her plans to travel to
China or conduct interviews.
When IRBs do respond, they can set conditions on researchers' methods. Some of the most striking restrictions
concern research about pressing public concerns, just the
sort of thing that we might want to encourage scholars to
pursue. Sociologist Jack Katz has tracked IRB interference
with studies of Mormon sexuality, university admissions
practices, and labor conditions at Indian casinos. Though
the IRBs no doubt claimed ethical concerns, the effect is to
block politically sensitive research.
Geographer Joshua Inwood wanted to interview people who had helped Greensboro, North Carolina, deal with
the unhealed wounds left by a fatal 1979 attack by Klansmen and Nazis on a communist-led demonstration. His
IRB chair summoned him to a meeting with the university
general counsel, who wanted to vet all of Inwood's manuscripts before he sent them out to peer review. Inwood resisted this demand, but he was forced to agree not to identify public officials by name, lest the airing of their views
lead to electoral defeat. His published scholarship leaves out
important quotations from the interviews he conducted, in
favor of statements from public hearings and newspapers.
"I've got this notion of American democracy, where public
officials should be accountable for their views," Inwood laments. "That shouldn't be a harm; it should be part of the
process." Dreading a career in which his research would be
constrained by an unreasonable IRB, Inwood moved to a different university.
Even innocuous studies are at risk. A pair of researchers who wanted to survey music education majors about
why they had chosen that profession faced so many burdensome requirements that their sample was reduced from several thousand to 250. The same thing happened to a doctoral student who sought to survey college professors about
the knowledge and skills they hoped to impart. Forced by
the University of South Florida IRB to seek permission from
every university whose faculty she wished to contact, she

struggled simply to get messages returned by many of those
other IRBs.
At the City University of New York, it took a librarian five months to get approval to ask students about their
study habits and their use of the library. Unsurprisingly, she
reported, "fear of the complexity of IRB regulations has led
librarian researchers I know to simply avoid any research involving library users."
If a researcher can complete her study, an IRB may
still insist that she not report everything she learned. An
IRB forbade anthropologist Scott Atran from identifying
the terrorist networks he was studying, so that rather than
write about, say, Hamas, he would have to refer to "Group
A." This issue of the magazine features work by Amy Binder, whose important research (and subsequent book) on
campus conservatism was degraded by foolish IRB requirements. Forced to keep secret not only the names of the students they interviewed but even the sites of their work,
Binder and her coauthor could not quote the students' writing in campus newspapers or explore the influence of spe-

Anyone who cares about
universities' ability to study
society and train researchers
should worry about the
obstacles institutional
review boards can impose.
cific faculty members. And by keeping real names out of the
final book, the IRB prevented future journalists and historians from understanding the early careers of the next generation's Karl Rove or Dinesh D'Souza.
While faculty and advanced graduate students are the
researchers most likely to face IRB troubles, undergraduates
are affected as well. Some professors have stopped assigning interview projects, judging it not worth the bother. And
ambitious students writing capstone theses must plan well
in advance to get approval before their senior year. Whatever the outcome of an individual project, IRB rules can make
both teaching and research more timid.

alancing the interests of researchers, research participants, and society at large is not easy. As Harvard IRB
chair E. L. Pattullo wrote in 1978, "There is no sieve,
consistent with the maintenance of a healthy research enterprise, which will ensure against every possibility of subject abuse." Short of prohibiting or permitting all research,
any system will impose too much scrutiny on some studies
and too little on others.
Washington Monthly

Washington Monthly - September/October 2014

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