Frustration...

[sarahmichelef]

Somebody needs to write up Human Subjects forms that are appropriate for sociological research. I don't want to lock people in a room and tell them to push the button. I don't want to put one of their arms in a cast so I can study muscular degeneration (there actually was such a study at UMass a couple of years ago). I don't want to give them experimental drugs, take their blood, or mess with their heads. I simply want to ask them some questions about how they think about public and private.

But the forms that I have to fill out, even just for my departmental IRB (since my project is un-sponsored), make NO SENSE in the context of what I want to do. For example, my research is considered "non-beneficial." You'd think that non-beneficial would be, you know, a bad thing. But in my case, it just means that no individual person is going to get healthier as a result of participating in my study.

Rargh. Rargh, I say.

Comments

[baronessmartha.livejournal.com]

and I feel sure that the most important question is not on any of those forms:

"Will it be mean and or funny?"

It really gets overlooked.

[irihs.livejournal.com]

Does the same committee review medical and non-medical stuff? Weird! At Yale, we had separate folks for social science stuff.

We always answered the beneficial question with some garbage about how the knowledge we gain could have potential future applications in education, parenting practice, etc. And of course, we always mentioned that our participants would get free passes to the Peabody museum or their choice of toys or something. What a 5 year old considers a benefit (rubber finger puppet!) is totally different from what an IRB committee considers beneficial.

[alphasarah.livejournal.com]

It's just a departmental committee! It's the grad program director (also my advisor), the department head, and one other faculty member (head of the research institute that's part of the department). But they make you fill out all the same paperwork that you'd have to do if you were going to the full university IRB, which I believe is exactly the same for all disciplines.

I'm just saying that participants aren't taking on any greater risk than they already do by publishing a 'blog, and that studying them is the best way to understand how the Internet is involved in changing conceptions of public and private.

I have no doubt that the project is going to pass the committee, which makes me resent the stupid paperwork even more.

[cranky-dragon.livejournal.com]

I am so not looking forward to my HSR application.