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Who exactly needs to get approval from an institutional review board (IRB)?

dynomight.net

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Re: Who exactly needs to get approval from an institutional review board (IRB)?

#41

Post by web007 »

> As an analogy, driving a car is dangerous. Whenever I drive, I could easily kill someone. But the government doesn’t force me to submit a driving plan any time I want to go somewhere. Instead, if I misbehave, I am punished in retrospect. Why don’t we apply the same policy to research?

"We" decided that Tuskegee was bad enough that it should be stopped before harm is done, and that there is no appropriate or sufficient "punish[ment] in retrospect" for the fallout.

The government makes you get a license to drive at all, then "drive a Pinto" versus "drive a Trabant" are similar enough that they don't require more info. They require you to get different licensure to drive a bigger truck where you could potentially cause more harm, or to drive an airplane. In this analogy the IRB is the DMV/FAA/whatever, and you're asking for permission to drive a tank, a motorized unicycle, a helicopter, an 18-wheeler or a stealth fighter. You don't get a Science License rubber stamp because that's like getting a Vehicle License - the variation in "Vehicle" is big enough that each type needs review.

Re: Who exactly needs to get approval from an institutional review board (IRB)?

#42

Post by nxobject »

perihelions wrote: post #12

And yet, FAANG's somehow get way with employing credentialed psychologists and psychiatrists, to experiment on social media users, for maximizing their various engagement and click metrics. For the scale and impact of non-IRB human psychology research, that one has to be at the very top.

I wouldn’t be surprised that, if Facebook was suddenly subject to extra scrutiny, they would just hire an independent IRB in the way that corporate clinical research does, e.g.:

https://www.sterlingirb.com/ https://www.pearlirb.com/

Re: Who exactly needs to get approval from an institutional review board (IRB)?

#43

Post by mrkeen »

avalys wrote: post #37
perihelions wrote: post #12

And yet, FAANG's somehow get way with employing credentialed psychologists and psychiatrists, to experiment on social media users, for maximizing their various engagement and click metrics. For the scale and impact of non-IRB human psychology research, that one has to be at the very top.

Cite that this actually happens? Note that “this person is a psychologist and is employed by Meta working on user research” is not evidence that supports the statement you made.

This comes to mind https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-...

Re: Who exactly needs to get approval from an institutional review board (IRB)?

#47

Post by Xcelerate »

cal1co wrote: post #34

An article like this is interesting from a research (meta-research?) perspective, but I think the lack of relevant case law (nobody seems to have ever been prosecuted) really undermines the usefulness. It's easy for people (especially the kinds of people who gravitate towards engineering) to get all worked up about the necessary implications of the regulations as-written. But it's also important to remember that bein…

> It's easy for people (especially the kinds of people who gravitate towards engineering) to get all worked up about the necessary implications of the regulations as-written

I was once trying to figure out taxes owed on some RSUs granted in California that vested in North Carolina (and some other edge case that I can’t remember). Hoh boy. What a rabbit hole. I didn’t think the CPA that I hired to do my taxes handled it correctly, so I started digging into the tax laws and regulations. Couldn’t find anything that covered my specific case. So I started digging into court cases involving disputes over RSU taxes owed in North Carolina and found conflicting outcomes.

I brought what I had found back to the CPA who basically said something along the lines of: there is no absolute “rule” for what to do in this case like you’re looking for. We make a good faith effort to mirror what was done in similar prior situations, write a number down, and then forget about it unless you hear from the IRS.

Did not make me feel very confident about the legal system.

Re: Who exactly needs to get approval from an institutional review board (IRB)?

#48

Post by [deleted] »

web007 wrote: post #41

> As an analogy, driving a car is dangerous. Whenever I drive, I could easily kill someone. But the government doesn’t force me to submit a driving plan any time I want to go somewhere. Instead, if I misbehave, I am punished in retrospect. Why don’t we apply the same policy to research? "We" decided that Tuskegee was bad enough that it should be stopped before harm is done, and that there is no appropriate or suffici…

[deleted]

Re: Who exactly needs to get approval from an institutional review board (IRB)?

#50

Post by photochemsyn »

The reason nobody is interested in the independent research efforts of little online community groups is that it's almost certain that they didn't put enough thought into the statistical design of their study, and thus the results are meaningless. Generally professional academics have to submit their research proposal to a funding agency and the statistical design is examined at every stage of the process to ensure that results will have some validity - and even then, it's not unusual for preliminary studies that look promising to be overturned by later more comprehensive studies.

Even with all this professional double-checking, a non-trivial amount of fraud and data manipulation takes place as academics rush to climb the bureaucratic ladder or get large corporations to buy their government-subsidized startups, often making it difficult even for experts in the field to determine what's reliable and what isn't.

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