Protecting Human Research Participants, IRBs, and Political Science Redux: Editor's Introduction

Abstract

In the 1990s I testified before a National Science Foundation (NSF) panel headed by Cora Marrett, then assistant director for the NSF Directorate for the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. The subject of the panel's inquiry, and this issue's symposium, was social science research and the federally mandated but decentralized human subjects protection program and its principal actors, institutional review boards (IRBs). My testimony addressed the ways in which the regulatory system ill-fit and ill-served political science research. IRBs had expanded their mission to include all research, not just research funded by the federal government, enhancing their scope of authority while slowing the timeliness of reviews. Similarly, and with the same result, IRBs were evaluating secondary research as well as primary research. Although the federal legislation provided for a nuanced assessment of risk, the distinction between potentially risk-laden research necessitating a full IRB review and research posing minimal or no risk that could be either exempted or given expedited review was disappearing. The length of the review process threatened the beginning or completion of course work and degree programs. IRBs were judging the merits of research projects rather than the risks involved. This trend was especially problematic because representation on many IRBs was skewed toward biological and behavioral scientists often unfamiliar with the methods and fields of political science and the other social sciences. And the list went on.