Speeding Up the IRB Process

Time to Read: <5 Minutes

I have had the pleasure to serve on an Institutional Review Board since 2016. The experience has benefitted me time and again as a researcher and as a friend to researchers. I have helped many of my peers with this daunting process and have realized two things:

No matter which Univeristy in which state someone is attending, there are some common misconceptions about how IRB works.

There is not much written specifically about the process to guide people through it.

To fill that gap, I will periodically be posting about the IRB process.

Note: My advice is general and will vary from school to school. I am not a lawyer or a compliance officer... just someone who wants to help.

The Need for Speed

The IRB process can take anywhere from a few days to a few months. This news may be shocking, especially if you defended your prelim in August, planned to collect data at a local school in September, thought you would spend October and November crafting chapters four and five, and counted on defending your dissertation just before winter break. Maybe you already envisioned everyone calling you Dr. So-and-so at Christmas dinner. If you are not prepared for IRB, you may not even be gathering data until January.

Maverick (Tom Cruise) and Goose (Anthony Edwards) in Top Gun (Tony Scott, Paramount Pictures, 1986)

The best way you can speed this up is to minimize risk in your procedures, avoid using protected populations as participants (i.e. prisoners and children), and submitting a complete and easy-to-understand application.

Minimizing Risks in Procedures

This happens when you are planning your study. Before you even start writing, visualize yourself collecting data, and ask yourself these questions:
  • What will the data look like? 
  • Will it be handwritten responses to paper surveys? 
  • Audio or video recordings from focus groups?
  • Notes from case study observations?
  • Who will transcribe the notes?
  • If you use an online transcription service, will they maintain data security?
  • If you use an online survey platform, will they maintain data security?
  • Are there certain, university-approved services for transcription and online surveys?
  • Will the data be on a spreadsheet with a row for each participant and a column for each variable? 
  • Will it be multiple spreadsheets?
  • Do you need to be able to link multiple variables from multiple sheets to individual participants? 
  • Will people's names be on the spreadsheets? 
  • Where will all of the data be kept?
  • Is Google Drive acceptable?
  • How will you ensure it remains private?
  • If you are using pseudonyms to protect participants, how will you keep them straight?
  • What if one of the participants accidentally uses someone's real name during a recorded focus group?
  • What does data collection look like?
  • Who are the participants? 
  • Are you talking to them, observing them, asking them to complete a questionnaire, getting anonymous data about them from some database? 
  • How will you get enough people to participate? 
  • Will everyone speak English?
  • If not, do I have a plan to adequately convey risk and gain informed consent?
  • Would it be better to exclude non-English speakers?
  • Will excluding them make them feel left out?
  • What are my options for language barriers?
  • How many participants is enough?
  • What might keep people from participating?
  • How do you overcome these barriers to participation?
  • Should you leave out uncomfortable questions?
  • Should you make the survey shorter?
  • Should you decrease the number of interactions required for participants?
  • Should you pay people to participate?
  • What about non-participants? 
  • Will they be left out while almost everyone else is participating?
  • Can they participate in the activity, just not be part of the data collection?
  • Is participation conditional for attending a camp or after-school care?
  • Will they be excluded from working with their friends, feeling left out just because their parents did not let them participate?
  • Will any of these conditions coerce them into participating?
  • How will you record what is going on without accidentally getting nonparticipants?
  • Can someone get physically hurt?
  • Are you asking people to relive traumatic experiences?
  • What will you do if someone breaks down?
  • Will the participants be sharing some embarrassing or illegal facts?
  • What will you do if you learn someone abuses kids?
  • What will you do if you learn a kid is being abused?
The list can get much more severe, but it seems unlikely that you would include dangerous or life-threatening activities in your dissertation research. If you are considering that, just don't. Get your doctorate over with before you start pushing the envelope!

Avoid Using Protected Populations as Participants

Avoiding protected participants is easier said than done. If you are getting a doctorate in education, you will probably use student data in your dissertation. However there may be alternatives. Work-arounds include interviewing teachers or administrators instead of students, only including students or former students over the age of 18, and using publicly available datasets instead of gathering your own data. I used data from Texas' school accountability system to answer the research questions for my dissertation. My IRB approval was dated five days after I submitted.

Speaking of research questions... As you write them, think about what data you would need to actually answer them. There is a reason that some very good questions have yet to be answered with research, and it may be that it is just impossible to get the data. Set yourself up for an easy IRB experience—and research success—by considering data collection and participants even as you plan chapter one.

Submit a Complete and Easy-to-Understand Application

We will go into various aspects of the application in future posts, but the key here is coherence.
  • Be consistent.
    • If you mentioned a risk of allergic reaction in the risks section, then your informed consent should mention it.
    • If you said the max age for participation was 10, then how is your study being conducted at a middle school where almost all students are at least 11?
    • If you said participation would be anonymous, why are you collecting participant names? Did you mean confidential?
  • Be succinct.
    • Don't just copy and paste your chapter two into the question about prior relevant research.
    • Use headings to guide understanding. Reviewers should be able to read the heading then skim the subsequent text for relevant details
    • Answer the question asked.
  • Attach all materials.
    • CITI certification
    • Your advisor's CITI certification
    • Anyone else listed as a researcher's CITI certification
    • Your instrument
    • Letter of support from any organization where you intend to conduct research
    • Informed consent/assent forms
    • Include diagrams if that helps understanding
  • Seek help
    • From your chair
    • From the IRB representative 
    • From the IRB website
    • From someone who recently went through the process
    • From this blog

The Best Dissertation is a Done Dissertation

You've got this!

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