Guidelines and Procedures for Research Using Human Subjects

Faculty, staff, and students at Earlham College, the Earlham School of Religion, and in Earlham’s Graduate Programs in Education conduct research using human subjects. Such research is regulated by federal guidelines to ensure that the rights of every human subject are protected and that all research is ethical. In addition to federal regulations shared by teaching and research institutions nationwide, we at Earlham take care to protect the integrity of our campus community. Many students conduct research among their peers for pedagogical purposes, and we want to safeguard the privacy, reputation, and physical and emotional well-being of all of our students. This means that we focus on the federal guidelines while assessing research proposals but also take care to assess the effects of research proposals within our intimate residential environment.

Responsibility to guarantee the ethical and legal soundness of all research undertaken at the College in its various settings is distributed among the individual researcher(s), the program or project supervisor, and Earlham College’s Institutional Review Board (IRB). As required by federal policy (45 CFR 46), the IRB consists of at least five voting members. The IRB is under the oversight of the Chief Academic Officer and has been granted Federalwide Assurance (FWA00023058).

No research on human subjects by any participant in any of our programs at whatever level may be conducted without prior IRB review and approval. There are two types of IRB reviews possible, a Full Review or an Expedited Review. In addition, some of the research conducted on campus may qualify as being Exempt from review, however, it is the role of the IRB – not the researcher(s) or faculty sponsor – to determine whether a research project is Exempt from review. The following pages provide information to help researchers determine which of the review types are necessary for proposed research projects. Determinations surrounding approval/disapproval are communicated through the convener of the IRB, after a proposal has gone before the full IRB committee or a subset of IRB members. Should any member of the IRB committee submit a proposal for review, this member cannot be involved in the deliberation or decision-making about her/his proposal.

Finally, when research will involve Earlham students as participants, researchers should be sensitive to the diverse nature of our student body. Special care should be taken to ensure that effects of the research are equivalent across identity groups (e.g., domestic minorities, international students, students with disabilities, etc.). Such consideration should be addressed in the IRB application form. Researchers wishing to collect data from the entire student body (or a randomly selected subset) must clear their research project with the Committee on Assessment and Accreditation, in addition to receiving IRB approval.

Policy specifications