Symposium: Compliance or Concern? Institutional Review Boards in Journalism and Mass Communication Education.

Introduction Are the very principles of freedom of expression and the First Amendment that underlie much of the scholarship in journalism and mass communication education placed at risk by federal regulations that require prior approval of research designs? Four senior scholars deliberate on the rationale, contradictions, ethics, and First Amendment issues generated by compliance with federal research regulations. * * Editor's Note: A panel focused on IRBs is scheduled for the 2002 AEJMC Annual Convention. "Institutional Review Boards and Prior Restraint," Friday, August 9,5:00 to 6:30 p.m. Panelists: Margaret Blanchard, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Mary Ann Ferguson, University of Florida; Annie Lang, Indiana University, Bloomington; Glenn Leshner, University of Missouri. Moderator, Erik Bucy, Indiana University. Brandon Hunt and Can dice A. Yekel Moving from Compliance to Concern In 1974, the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research was established, and Congress passed the National Research Act. These were the first regulations in the United States protecting the rights and welfare of research participants and establishing the institutional review board (IRB) as a mechanism to protect human participants involved in research. According to Title 45 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Part 46.102(d), research is defined as a systematic investigation designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.1 The primary purpose of the IRB is to protect the rights and welfare of research participants in several ways. First, it protects people's privacy by ensuring that information about research participants is safeguarded. Second, it protects research participants by ensuring that researchers make informed consent about participating in research. Finally, it protects research participants by reviewing research studies before they begin to minimize the potential for harm to participants. The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research, written in 1979 to address the legislation mentioned above, addresses three basic principles: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice.2 Respect for persons includes the notion that research participants should be treated as autonomous agents who have free will and that people who have diminished autonomy (e.g., children, people with psychiatric disabilities, people who are incarcerated) should be protected. This means that participants enter into the research voluntarily and that they have informed choice. Beneficence means that researchers, regardless of their field of study, will do no harm to participants and that they will maximize the possible benefits and minimize possible harm that could occur as a result of being involved in the research study. In terms of justice, researchers will treat all participants equally. Related to these three principles are the issues of informed consent, assessment of risks and benefits, and selection of participants. Informed consent is often times viewed as a single snapshot in time rather than a process that goes beyond a signature on a consent form. All people who participate in research studies have the right to make an informed decision about what could potentially happen to them if they participate in a research study. Information about the study should be presented to potential participants in a manner that clearly states what will happen during the study in a way they can comprehend. Informed consent also means making sure that potential participants know that their participation is completely voluntary and that they can cease their participation at any time. Providing this information empowers participants by giving them enough knowledge to make an informed decision. The role of the IRB, and that of the researchers themselves, is to assess the potential risks and benefits of the research study, particularly whether the potential risks to participants can be justified in some way. …