Historians who work on events that occurred within living memory bridle at having to submit their projects to institutional review boards
An oral historian sits down with a survivor of Hurricane Katrina to hear a first-person account of the storm. Is their encounter a conversation about a historical event, or is that historian performing research on a human subject?
The scholar will have one answer. It may not jibe with the verdict of his or her college’s institutional review board, whose mandate is to make sure that research involving humans stays within ethical bounds, regardless of the topic. Over the past decade, it has become increasingly likely that before the historian ever switches on a tape recorder, the board will insist that he or she put the project — or protocol, in IRB-speak — through the kind of vetting that was designed to keep biomedical and psychological experiments on the straight and narrow.
The debate cuts to the heart of what historians do, especially if they study events that took place within living memory. And it is becoming more urgent, as events like Katrina and the attacks of September 11, 2001, inspire more scholars to turn to the recent past and to oral history as a means of recording and understanding it. But as oral history becomes more popular and more pervasive, both as a research tool and as a pedagogical technique, it has also come under more scrutiny. And that worries scholars who are not used to being on the regulatory radar.
As the American Historical Association has documented in a series of periodic updates in its monthly newsletter, Perspectives, IRB’s have over the past several years begun to pay closer attention to all research projects that involve human beings, no matter what the field. Ten years ago, when Linda Shopes was president-elect of the Oral History Association, she remembers only “a handful of complaints” from oral historians about IRB’s. Since then, with colleges increasingly wary of potential lawsuits, oral historians have found their work caught up in regulatory reviews.
Some historians, especially those who work at colleges where oral history is well established, are quickly turned loose by their IRB’s. Others get tangled up in a review process they find cumbersome and unfriendly. They accuse review boards of a failure to understand the nature of historical research and of an overzealous commitment to a one-size-fits-all system of review. In such cases, a scholar who specializes in, say, the civil-rights movement may find that, in terms of how his research is viewed by the university, and the paperwork he or his students must complete, he may have more in common with a colleague in the medical school than he does with the medievalist down the hall.
Historians and their professional organizations fear that the review climate will have a chilling effect at a time when oral history is booming.
“It’s not as though it’s completely or extensively inhibiting oral-history projects,” says Ms. Shopes, who works for the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. “But there’s anecdotal evidence from various surveys and personal communications that students are not picking up projects that might get them into trouble with institutional review boards, in history and in other fields also. ... Some professors are reluctant to have their students interview Grandma, which is patently ridiculous.”
Members of IRB’s, meanwhile, point out that they themselves are researchers, although very few of them hail from the humanities. Still, they say, they are trying to facilitate research, not to stifle it.
Regulating History
Last month the American Association of University Professors released a report, “Research on Human Subjects: Academic Freedom and the Institutional Review Board.” The report cites “a by now enormous literature that points to objectionable features” of IRB’s. Those include “the unchecked power” granted to the boards, which has “resulted in a number of more or less familiar horror stories.” The report draws examples from fields as unlikely as English and journalism, as well as from the social sciences and the hard sciences.
Similar stories circulate freely among oral historians. Some vignettes are almost comic in their depiction of IRB’s run amok. Gerald E. Shenk, an associate professor of social history at California State University-Monterey Bay, says he has tangled with his IRB three times. In one case, according to Mr. Shenk, the IRB chair threatened that “an undergraduate student of mine could be prosecuted if he interviewed his former high-school history teacher without prior IRB approval.”
Another student was denied permission to use an interview he had conducted years earlier with his own father, Mr. Shenk said in an e-mail message, “because he had not secured IRB approval prior to the interview, and that in any case, the IRB could not approve a student doing an oral history with his father, since that involved power relations that could not be mitigated by informed consent.”
IRB’s sprang up in the 1970s as part of the federal government’s attempts to protect people who served as research subjects from the kinds of abuse that had taken place in the past, most notoriously in cases like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study run under government auspices from 1932 to 1972. The relevant laws, administered by the Office for Human Research Protections, in the Department of Health and Human Services, appear to make an exception for oral history, depending on whom you ask. Even so, IRB’s enjoy quite a bit of discretion about how far to extend their oversight, and at most colleges there is no appealing their decisions. That, their members say, protects them from external pressure.
In a posting on the American Historical Association’s blog last month, titled “The Problem With IRB’s,” Robert B. Townsend, assistant director of research and publications, summed up the situation as the association sees it. The original mandate of the IRB’s was “hardly objectionable,” he wrote, “as there are more than enough horror stories to warrant real care on these issues. Unfortunately, however, over the past few decades, college and university administrators expanded the mandate and mission of the IRB’s to cover methods of academic research — such as oral history — where there is no evident risk of harm.”
History organizations have developed detailed guidelines for their members on how to conduct research ethically, but those do not satisfy many IRB’s. Often, even when an oral-history project qualifies for expedited review or an IRB exemption, the scholar must apply for such status. And a project that gets a pass on one campus could, on another, be subjected to the kind of thorough vetting designed primarily for biomedical or psychological protocols.
“If you want to get in a nutshell what I think the problem for oral history is, it’s the lack of consistency,” says Rebecca Sharpless, an assistant professor of history at Texas Christian University, who has just stepped down as president of the Oral History Association. “One oral historian may be required to submit the name of every single person he or she wants to interview,” while another will be told that it’s between him and his department.
‘Leaving Evidence on the Table’
For historians who deal with the long dead, none of that is an issue. But more and more scholars want to tackle the kind of history that one can hear about from the people who participated in it. A report on job prospects for historians in the January 2006 issue of Perspectives called attention to graduate students’ growing attraction to the recent past. “By most estimates,” it noted, “more than half of the new history Ph.D. recipients in recent years specialized in some aspect of U.S. history — with a majority working on the past 100 years.”
“If you’re working in post-World War II history and you’re not doing oral-history interviews,” says Ms. Sharpless, “it means you’re leaving evidence on the table. ... There are so many questions in history that you are only going to get at if you ask people.”
Historians once viewed oral history with skepticism, as too dependent on the fallible nature of memory. “There were times where people pointed at all the problems with the methodology,” says Stephen M. Sloan, of the University of Southern Mississippi, where he serves as one of the directors of the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage. “Oral historians would be the first to acknowledge that there are problems with memory and misremembering.”
But over the past 30 years, and especially over the past decade or so, oral history has enjoyed “a growth and acceptance among historians as a sound methodology,” says Mr. Sloan. “It can now point to a body of work that is very rich,” including the “foundational” work of theorists like Alessandro Portelli, an Italian scholar who wrote The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997) and other influential works. “As it matures as a methodology, I think more and more students are getting interested in it.”
A recent survey conducted by Ms. Sharpless, who directed the Institute for Oral History at Baylor University before joining the faculty at Texas Christian, and Ms. Shopes found that oral history is widespread in the curriculum.
Students may be drawn by its practical as well as its theoretical appeal. Consider the documentary record that has accumulated in the United States alone since 1900. “If you’re doing recent U.S. history,” says Mr. Sloan, “you’re dealing with an avalanche of information. Oral history offers you a very different sort of information. It’s attractive.”
The Gift of Narrative
Some IRB’s, especially on campuses where oral history is well established, trust historians to conduct their research in a responsible manner. At Southern Mississippi, Mr. Sloan’s center enjoys an excellent relationship with the campus IRB. “I think because we’re a fairly old program — we go back to the 70s — they’ve given us a lot of leeway,” he says.
At the moment, he and the other co-director, Curtis J. Austin, have “been consumed pretty much with Katrina.” Their researchers have fanned out across six states to collect stories about “all different aspects of the storm” from evacuees, first responders, nurses, and other people who were involved or affected. “There are so many facets to that story,” says Mr. Sloan, “it seems like every week there’s another angle of it to explore.”
Informed consent is firmly established as a guiding principle for those engaged in oral history. The center briefs interviewers in the code of standards and principles developed by the Oral History Association. It requires that the researchers have interviewees sign a “gift statement” granting them permission to use the material for nonprofit, educational uses, and that subjects be informed that they have the right to see the material before it is made available for research.
So far that kind of self-policing has satisfied the university’s IRB. “At one point I looked at their permission forms or consent forms, and they met our criteria,” says Lawrence A. Hosman, a professor of speech communication at Southern Mississippi who is the institutional review board’s chairman. “They’re not hiding anything. They do have informed consent.” In the 25 years that he has served on the review board, he recalls, he has never had any complaints about the oral-history center. “We really don’t bother them much,” as he puts it.
Mr. Sloan wonders how long that situation will last. After Katrina, he has found, “there are so many other disciplines interested in dealing with the storm, it’s kind of a quantum leap for us. It’s such an ongoing event, it’s opened up the spectrum of who’s interested in doing research in it.” He has been approached by scholars in the health and business fields, for instance, who want to incorporate oral history into their research.
The question of oversight “is going to become more and more of an issue,” he believes, “as the topics I’m dealing with get more sensitive.” He points to another of the Southern Mississippi center’s projects, one that involves members of the National Guard from Mississippi who are veterans of the war in Iraq. “As I deal with these more sensitive subjects, I can see the value of IRB” review, he says. “I know its purpose. I know why it’s there. And I think at the heart of it there’s an interest in the narrators that we’re dealing with.”
Talking About Dialogue
At institutions where oral history is not as familiar, IRB’s sometimes take a different and, from a historian’s perspective, unhelpful interest in narrators, whom they insist on classifying as human subjects. That does not sit well with many oral historians, who, after all, are simply talking to their sources, not jabbing them with needles.
But anthropologists, ethnographers, and other social scientists often incorporate interviews into their research, and they routinely deal with IRB’s, even though, as the AAUP report makes clear, they don’t always like it. Why should oral history be exempt if similar work in other fields is not?
In the March 2004 issue of the American Historical Association’s Perspectives, Ms. Shopes and Donald Ritchie, of the U.S. Senate Historical Office, put the case this way: “Oral historians’ standard operating procedures do not fit the type of research defined by federal regulations: ‘a systematic investigation, including research development, testing and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.’ Individually tailored interviews with the narrator’s informed consent do not meet this definition of research.”
“The margins aren’t always clear,” acknowledges Ms. Sharpless, of Texas Christian. But she sees two important distinctions that set oral history apart: The interviews are always recorded, which creates a permanent record, and they are usually archived for posterity. “Oral-history interviews are done with the long-range picture in mind, with the idea that the materials will be around for a long time,” she explains. “With the emphasis on accountability, we do not make our sources anonymous except in cases where being identified would put them at extreme risk.”
Narrative, not data, drives the enterprise. In “What Is Oral History?,” a pamphlet designed to introduce students to some of the fundamentals of the field, Ms. Shopes describes it as, “at its best, a dialogue, ... a self-conscious, disciplined conversation between two people about some aspect of the past considered by them to be of historical significance, and intentionally recorded” with the intent of preserving it.
That kind of nuance is not likely to resonate with most IRB’s, which are heavily populated by scientists and, to a lesser extent, social scientists. To come across a humanist on an IRB is as startling as spotting a peacock in a flock of robins.
Some institutions, like Purdue University, tailor the review process a bit by having a separate IRB for the social sciences. But no historians currently sit on Purdue’s social-sciences IRB, which is chaired by Richard D. Mattes, a professor of foods and nutrition on the main campus and a veteran of many IRB reviews himself.
He points out that Purdue’s board attempts to give all protocols equal treatment, whether or not federal funds are involved. “We don’t think it’s fair to have a double standard,” he says. “The funding source doesn’t dictate whether something’s ethical or not.”
It’s a mistake, he continues, for humanists to assume that the idea of simply assessing potential risk to subjects is at the heart of what the IRB does. In practice, a review board is not limited to enforcing the federal regulations; it can expand its mandate as its members and the institution feel is appropriate. At Purdue, says Mr. Mattes, “the working rule that we follow is that it’s a systematic collection of information about people with the intent to create generalized knowledge, and that’s a fairly widely used definition. ... Notice that nowhere in that is the word ‘risk.’”
The projects may be different in nature from, say, a clinical drug trial or a psychology experiment. But “if you’re creating a body of knowledge or a collection of information with the intent of having it used by people in the future, that brings it across the line,” he says. “That’s not different from creating a database of DNA.”
Oral history ran rather spectacularly afoul of Mr. Mattes’s review board this past spring, when a Ph.D. candidate whose dissertation was about the civil-rights movement was denied permission to graduate, as planned, because he had failed to turn in the requisite IRB forms. People familiar with the case say that he was able to redo his forms, and that he received his degree in August, three months late. Neither the student nor his faculty adviser have been willing to speak publicly about the incident, and like all who serve on IRB’s, Mr. Mattes is legally prohibited from commenting on cases that come before his board.
The incident was, on one level, “sort of a bureaucratic matter,” says R. Douglas Hurt, head of the history department at Purdue. “This is an issue that seems much simpler than it really is. We all know what happened in the past — Tuskegee, for example. Individuals have to be protected. At the same time, there has to be a general understanding that the kind of research that historians do is very different from the kinds of research scientists or even social scientists do.”
Mr. Mattes takes issue with that idea. “Why do you make that distinction?” he asks. “The people from the humanities ... are evaluated on their research, are they not? So they’re engaged in the same activity as a biologist.”
The recent unpleasantness has left Mr. Hurt in an uncomfortable position. Most of the graduate students in his department who study 20th-century history incorporate oral history into their research; after the incident in the spring, he felt compelled to issue a memo telling them to cease that research until they were sure they had IRB clearance.
Now he is drafting a policy that he hopes will help history students and faculty members at Purdue navigate the process.
“What I’m dealing with is the art of the possible at the moment,” he says. “This is the playing field that we have to operate in because the IRB is not going to budge on this.”
The larger issues still trouble him: “The individuals on the IRB at Purdue, and I suspect this would be true at other institutions, really don’t understand what historians do, and they admit that. ... We’re not sending out anonymous questionnaires. Historians are sitting in a chair across from someone, and they are asking open-ended questions. ... It’s very different.”
Mr. Mattes has heard that complaint before. “Almost everybody who applies to the IRB feels they are an exception to the rule,” he says. “The IRB is the institution that everybody loves to hate because it’s the end of the whole process. ... It’s not what’s really holding up their research.”
In reality, he argues, research is never permanently shelved by his IRB. “If an investigator is willing to work with the committee, there is almost always a way to make a project work,” he says.
Historians, however, worry that what makes a project work from an IRB’s point of view — a suggestion, for instance, that sources be “de-identified” to protect them — can alter the very nature of the research in question.
Mr. Mattes points out that the IRB does consult outside experts in the field if its members feel unqualified to judge a proposal. And he encourages historians to help the board educate itself on what they do. They can even apply to join the IRB, although to his knowledge none has yet.
The professional history groups have been consulting with the AAUP about how best to navigate this patchwork regulatory landscape. When the Oral History Association held its annual conference, in late October, its executive council voted to endorse the AAUP’s recent report on academic freedom and IRB’s, which urges policy makers and academic institutions to consider as “straightforwardly exempt” from IRB review any “research whose methodology consists entirely of collecting data by survey, conducting interviews, or observing behavior in public places.”
“It’s not that we want clearer rules. We want different rules,” says Jonathan Knight, director of the AAUP’s department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance.
At the very least, if they can’t change the system, oral historians will have to continue to educate themselves about the folkways of their institutional bureaucracies — and to educate those bureaucracies about what it is they do. Mr. Shenk, despite his problems with the IRB at Cal State-Monterey Bay, believes that historians can benefit from the process. The university now has an oral historian on its review board, he notes.
“When an IRB functions with understanding and sensitivity to the way historians work, it can be an excellent way to help students and faculty think through the ethical implications of their projects,” says Mr. Shenk. “I believe that all history faculty are now aware of IRB policies, and that all student oral-history projects now go through the IRB.”
Meanwhile, the stories continue to circulate. “If there’s a chilling effect on oral history, I would argue that history is going to suffer mightily,” says Ms. Sharpless. “Sometimes oral history is the best or only evidence.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 53, Issue 12, Page A14
