The provost’s office has established the Institutional Review Board to oversee projects that include human participants.
“Its purpose is fairly simple — it’s to assure adherence to ethical standards at any research project that uses human subjects,” said Samuel Negus, director of program review and accreditation at Hillsdale College.
The IRB will be concerned with research on participants outside the campus’s administrative jurisdiction but conducted by college faculty or students, Negus said.
“If it’s on campus, within the campus community, then the instructor of record for that course is considered sufficient to oversee that,” Negus said. “If you want to go downtown and start asking people stuff on the street, or you want to go over to a local school and do some interventions with kids in a classroom, that would have to go in front of the IRB.”
Negus made clear that IRBs might be involved in a wide range of research, and that its purpose at Hillsdale won’t necessarily be the same as those at larger institutions.
“If you go up to Ann Arbor, you’ve got research labs working on the latest cancer treatments,” Negus said. “You know, ‘sign this thing here that says you understand the risk and you’re willing to give it a try, and we’ll put you in a trial group and report on the results.’ That’s what IRBs do at big research institutions, and at some small colleges like this, where on a much smaller scale, research of that type goes on. But no research of that type happens here.”
In Hillsdale’s case, the IRB will have a special responsibility to oversee research that could elicit psychologically intrusive or overly personal questions from participants.
“If a student doing a research project for their senior thesis wants to conduct a survey asking about traumatic experiences in childhood and how that shapes the way people behave later in life, they could ask questions that are pretty personal,” Negus said. “You could have a participant disclose information of a deeply sensitive nature, like childhood acts of abuse. Those are the kinds of questions that an IRB seeks to evaluate and to see whether the human subject research that will be done carries a level of risk of harm or disclosure of sensitive personal information.”
The college previously experimented with a similar style of oversight, but the lack of a clear need to institute a concrete structure led to its falling out of use.
“When we were first asked by our accreditors about what happened to the ‘IRB 1.0’ that we made a trial run with a couple years ago, I responded with a memo,” Negus said. “We already have a pretty robust faculty statement of ethics that, informally and formally, we hold faculty to, and I think they can be trusted to not pursue dubious research policies.”
Ian Church, associate professor of philosophy and IRB member, said that a strong faculty is crucial for success and integrity within the research process.
“These are people who might have been involved with IRBs in the past, are involved with research, or are at some level familiar with this kind of project,” Church said. “I’ve had quite a bit of involvement with IRBs at other institutions by creating research projects responding to IRBs, so I know what kind of feedback IRBs can typically give.”
Senior Hannah Neukom, a psychology major, said she found the IRB’s oversight process to be thorough and beneficial for her own research efforts.
“I didn’t realize how many safeguards you have to put in just to protect yourself legally and protect your participants,” Neukom said. “At the end, we actually have to ask, ‘do you still want to participate?’ We can’t just say, ‘oh, sign the form.’ So you have to be very specific in how you’re going about getting consent.”
