IRB Advisor – August 1, 2019
August 1, 2019
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IRBs Can Expect Increase in Gun Violence Studies
In 2018, a spending bill allowed for research by the CDC into the causes of gun violence, paving the way for new studies to explore the issue. IRBs will need to anticipate these protocols and better understand risks and ethical issues involved in gun research.
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IRB Methods for Reviewing Gun Violence Study Protocols
Gun violence researchers must be sensitive to the emotional risks of participants.
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Small IRB Shows How to Handle Challenges
One small IRB has evolved in less than a decade from a board that had no full-time or part-time IRB professionals to having its own IRB administrator with part-time assistance. Limited staffing is one of the top challenges of small research programs.
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Ensure Study Participants Understand That Biobanking Is Research
In a recent study, parents in a pediatric ICU were approached to give consent to storage of their children’s specimens in a biobank for future research. In surveying parents afterward, the researchers found that almost half of those asked about the biobank did not seem to understand that storage of clinical specimens was a research pursuit.
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Testing an Intervention to Reinforce Ethical Research Practices
Historically, the value of scientific research has been undermined to some degree by lack of reproducible results, unpublished data, and studies that achieve statistical significance but are false positives. Some of these trends are fueled by researchers’ acceptance of “questionable research practices (QRPs),” researchers noted in a recent study.
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Social Media Research Presents Many Unresolved Ethical Issues
Direct-to-consumer wellness products, location-tracking apps, and access to personal data on social networks present both exciting opportunities and significant ethical worries for researchers. The authors of a recent paper proposed steps the scientific community can take to ensure social media data are used ethically. The paper was prompted in part by the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, involving allegations that the firm used data improperly obtained from Facebook to build voter profiles.