Hello, AEA365 community, and happy Conference Week from Portland! The AEA staff have been working overtime to prepare for our biggest event of the year. Whether you will be joining us for the conference or not, you can keep up with our happenings via the AEA365 blog. See you around!
-Liz DiLuzio, Lead Curator
Hi AEA365, Team Viable Insights here. Earlier this summer, we posted a blog here exploring IRBs. If you missed it, here’s a link. AEA365 was kind enough to let us continue this conversation in a second post.
Rather than spending too much time talking about the compliance side of IRBs, it seems much more useful to spend time talking about why engaging with IRBs should be something we want to do, regardless of whether we think our work falls under their purview. Since their inception, IRBs have served one core purpose: protecting the welfare of people in research. Over the past several years there has been excellent dialogue around how we evaluators can make the data collection process “less extractive”. It is so easy to forget that buried under all those numbers are people, but one way we help remind ourselves of that is to make sure that everything we do with those people (from recruitment through dissemination of data) is done in such a way that respects and protects them when they participate. IRBs don’t have to just be a “check the box” activity – we can use them as an external means of ensuring that our practices are participant-first.
If you aren’t yet sold on the idea of why IRBs are for everyone (and not just for those haunting the halls of academia), then consider what an IRB stamp of approval may convey to the participant. Principally, that this researcher cares enough about my welfare that they spent the time, effort, and (probably) money to have their research plans scrutinized for my benefit. Now, it is true that many if not most participants won’t know what an IRB even is, but that in itself creates an opportunity for public education.
To wrap up, I want to share a little bit about why we care so much about this topic. In the early days/projects at Viable Insights, we kept running into the same problem: a lack of access to a reasonable IRB solution. As many know, most IRBs live in places where research traditionally takes place – universities. The problem with this structure is that those of us outside of these institutions often have to pay a premium for our protocols to be reviewed, and even then we have to deal with the horrendous bureaucracy and administrative hurdles that come with the world of higher education. Without speaking for other evaluators, we couldn’t handle this dynamic…having to file complicated paperwork and applications, pay thousands of dollars for the review, and then have to wait a month or more for a determination. At that point, we decided to create something that would address what we saw as a major need in our community: VIRB, a IRB by evaluators for evaluators.
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VIRB was launched in the summer of 2021, and became what we like to consider (fully appreciating the cliche) an IRB for the people. Our board is made up of folks from diverse backgrounds (scientific and non-scientific), our commitment is a rapid-response review that averages 7 days, and our fees are accessible while still enabling us to provide equitable compensation for our board members’ time and expertise. Our goal has never been to have VIRB be our organization’s revenue titan. Rather, we think that IRBs should be available to all those firms and independent practitioners that don’t have access to their own board.
To date, VIRB has been well-received by our fellow applied researchers and evaluators, which led us to thinking about how else we could make ethical research more accessible to our community. As a result, in September we launched the Protecting People in Research & Evaluation (PPRE) human-subjects training. PPRE was built from scratch to address the unique needs and challenges faced by researchers and evaluators in the social and community sectors. ??Our human subject training is more suited to the applied research and evaluation line of work. If you haven’t deduced, PPRE was created to address the same issues that encouraged us to create VIRB.
We’d love to continue the conversation with you and continue to reshape the experience and role of these entities in our field. If you would like to talk about IRBs or research/evaluation ethics more, please do not hesitate to reach out at virb@viableinsights.com. We will also be in the exhibitor hall at AEA, so please stop by the table and say hi!
Thanks so much for reading, friends. We wish you the very best wrap to your 2024!
-Team Viable Insights
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