We have been pretty immersed in the process of completing our application to the University of California, Berkeley Institutional Review Board (IRB). For those non-researchers out there, this is a committee that looks after the safety and privacy of research participants. Because VideoVoice method and other visual methodologies infringe on privacy in some basic ways, despite all efforts to do so in an ethical manner, getting a research protocol through the IRB process can be harrowing.

Although we just turned in our protocol in yesterday, and we are still waiting to hear what the committee says, here are some tips that I have learned so far:

1. The community videographers that we work with can be considered “staff” and therefore the protection of these subjects is not under the authority of the Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects. Of course, it is still REALLY important to ensure informed consent and the protection of rights, as an ethical imperative, but the IRB application is much simplified by this distinction.
2. At Berkeley, at least, only University staff/students need to undergo a human subjects training. This means that, unless your grant requires it (NIH for example), you don’t have to make every single community participant go through the tedious process of understanding federal regulation on the protection of research subjects. Again, an ethics and safety training is essential to the VideoVoice process, as far as we see it, but this is different from a regulated training on HIPAA and other institutional concerns.

So… now we just need to cross our fingers.

If this subject is of interest to you, look for updates on the main website where we will be posting our consent forms as samples.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 12th, 2008 at 9:24 pm and is filed under CBPR Tips, Funding.