November 06, 2007

The Feds and IRBs: Your Opportunity to Weigh in

By Robert B. Townsend

The federal government is inviting comments (at http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/documents/20071026.htm) on policies that lead to the intrusion of institutional review boards (IRBs) into oral history research. This provides a rare opportunity for members of our profession to register their objections. I urge every historian who conducts oral history, or is responsible for students who use oral history methods, to respond to this request and express their concerns about the inappropriate and often arbitrary way this policy has been applied to history research in many colleges and universities. You have until December 26, 2007 (send comments to the mailing and email addresses listed at the end of this post).

For those who do not follow this issue, IRBs were set up at universities and research centers to protect “human subjects” (living people) from dangerous medical and psychological experiments. Unfortunately, the federal government’s rather vague policies joined with university administrators’ instinct to avoid potential liability, caught up practices in a number of other social science and humanities fields—including oral history research in our discipline. As a result, we receive regular complaints that the degrees of history doctoral students have been withheld, the research of some faculty have been put on hold, and history teachers and students have been threatened with substantial fines, just for talking to people about past experiences.

Over the past seven years, the AHA made a number of efforts to clarify or reverse this policy of using IRBs to regulate oral history, first by working with the federal Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP) to clarify their policy, and then by encouraging departments to engage the IRBs at their home institutions to clarify these policies. Despite all these efforts, an AHA staff survey last year found a patchwork of institutional policies that belie the notion that this is a federally-mandated policy.