It is awesome to hear about people of good faith involved in the IRB process, especially non-medical people who recognize disciplinary variation. And yet historians and folklorists and others are routinely told that they can't do what their disciplines tell them to do. The question is whether the IRB is a good way to get researchers to adopt appropriate ethics, and in practice the answer is too often no; the IRBlog I linked to in the post is full of horror stories. The question is whether the costs of centralized review stemming from the medical model are worth the benefits, and with disciplines engaging in their own ethical debates I come down on the side of "no."
Incidentally, the federal government does not mandate IRB coverage of significant chunks of university research; that's mission creep.
And I should be clear that I think this is a bad book, but I don't think pop scholarship is necessarily not scholarship.
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Date: 2009-09-01 04:59 pm (UTC)Incidentally, the federal government does not mandate IRB coverage of significant chunks of university research; that's mission creep.
And I should be clear that I think this is a bad book, but I don't think pop scholarship is necessarily not scholarship.