The expanding reach of institutional review boards, which has frustrated historians and social scientists, has also stymied research about sexuality, says a professor in the latest issue of Contexts, a magazine published by the American Sociological Association.
“The sexuality angle of this research complicated IRB deliberations in particular ways, and that’s because of the culture of stigma in general around sexuality,” Janice M. Irvine, author of the article, “Can’t Ask, Can’t Tell,” said in an interview.
Ms. Irvine, a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, whose past research has focused on battles over sex education, said she conducted a survey of her fellow sociologists who study sexuality to see whether data supported or contradicted what she had often heard anecdotally.
Had the broader culture’s increasingly tolerant attitudes about sex made it easier for scholars to conduct research on the subject? Or was their work still marginalized and considered controversial?
Her research into these larger questions found that frustrations with institutional review boards were so overwhelming that they merited their own paper, she said. “They just poured out on the page.”
Ms. Irvine canvassed members of the sociology association’s committee on sexuality, 155 of whom said they had conducted research. Of those academics, 119 said they had submitted sexuality-related projects to their institutional review boards. Fifty-two of them, or 44 percent, reported that their work had been slowed down or discouraged by the review board.
While she said it was important to remember that more than half of the respondents had no difficulty, the large number who did is a clear problem, one that limits the production of new knowledge. “To say that about half of the people in an area encountered problems is pretty significant and needs to be looked at,” Ms. Irvine said.
Misguided Concern
Institutional review boards, which were originally intended to protect human subjects of medical research, have become fixtures in the academic bureaucracy. Since the late 1990s, increased federal oversight has prompted the boards to weigh in with greater frequency on proposed research projects in the humanities and the social sciences, a trend that has alarmed scholars in those disciplines. Historians in particular have chafed at how review boards have affected their ability to conduct oral histories.
Those regulations are under review by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which hopes to accommodate distinctions between medical research and the other disciplines while maintaining the protection of human subjects.
The sociologist Jack Katz, of the University of California at Los Angeles, has argued that review boards have effectively censored research on hot-button issues. The pattern of their decisions displays “a colorful national quilt of parochialism, diverse and frequently petty in the interests served, almost charming in the honoring of America’s rich intolerances, regionally varying partisan biases, and wild fears,” he wrote in 2007.
Fears and assumptions about research on sexual topics emerged as a common theme in Ms. Irvine’s survey. She describes the frustrations of Elisabeth Sheff, an assistant professor of sociology at Georgia State University, who proposed a study of people who identify as kinky. Ms. Sheff said in the article that review-board approval “took just a hideously long time.”
Out of concern for her safety, the review board prohibited her from visiting respondents in their homes, which she says interfered with her ability to recruit subjects and conduct interviews. She wound up meeting them in her office, a public library, or at cafes.
“These people, who knew what they would do? If they were going to engage in kinky sex, maybe they would kidnap and torture me,” she said in the article, describing the premise of some on her review board. “And I was like, ‘It doesn’t really work that way.’” Georgia State declined to comment.
In another case, a proposal from one of Ms. Irvine’s graduate students to study gay servicemen under the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was rejected. It was blocked, she said, out of a misguided concern for the subjects.
“I imagine they may see themselves as defenders of gay servicemen when, in my way of thinking, they were silencing them,” Ms. Irvine said.
People do not need to be protected from talking about sex, she argued, even when it involves groups thought to be vulnerable.
In a study of 181 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender adolescents that was conducted by Brian Mustanski of Northwestern University, 89 percent reported being very comfortable or comfortable answering questions about their sexual behavior. And in a study published last month in Psychological Science, researchers at the University of New Mexico found that college students completing a survey about trauma and sex faced minimal risk of harm or discomfort relative to what they would encounter in daily life or through routine physical or psychological examinations. (A description of the study can be read here.)
It is not clear whether the pending revisions to the federal regulations for review boards will make research on sexuality any less thorny. The most recent draft of the regulations proposed exempting from review any research that poses a minimal risk to the subjects—as long as the topic is not “emotionally charged.”
Ms. Irvine is not sure how such a determination would be made. For now, her goal is to draw attention to a larger notion: that the members of institutional review boards can never be completely objective, because they are shaped by cultural forces.
“We need ethical review and ethical research,” she said. “But as long as we have these kinds of boards that review every proposal, it’s going to be challenging to make significant changes.”
