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Spurred by reported abuses in the medical community, the federal government mandated regulation to protect human research subjects in the form of institutional review boards. These committees evaluate applications to conduct research by assessing the risk and potential harm to research participants. Over time IRBs’ scope expanded to overseeing all research, regardless of federal funding and including the survey methods and field research applicable to the social sciences. Using a local, decentralized system, most IRBs are based on university campuses and they decide what constitutes acceptable research and procedure by professors and students. Yet as editor Robert J-P. Hauck explains in the symposium Protecting Human Research Participants, IRBs, and Political Science Redux, “Now as in the past, IRBs have no consistently applied metric for measuring risk and corresponding levels of IRB review.” With their broadened authority and incapacity to differentiate and adjust guidelines between biomedical and social science research, the symposium authors report that slow response times interfere with commencing research and with altering a plan after approval. The symposium’s articles offer plans to reconcile an ethical approach to research with how to institutionalize guidelines to protect human subjects without excessive restrictions.
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