informed about the object of the experiment and assured of confidentiality can they
consent to the experiment. And only then can the experiment proceed. Today, all major
research universities have a Committee on Research Involving Human Subjects
(CORIHS) or an Institutional Review Board (IRB) that oversees all research under-
taken at the university.
The Institutional Review Board
When people find out that you are a sociologist, they immediately assume that you’re
using them in some crazy research project, and in a few weeks you’ll be on Oprah,
talking about their childhood bed-wetting (with their picture, name, and phone num-
ber prominently displayed). They don’t realize that every research project that goes
through a university must pass the inspection of an institutional review board (IRB),
which has strict guidelines to protect test subjects. The researcher cannot even begin
the data collection unless he or she can guarantee:
■Informed consent. Test subjects must be informed, in advance, of the nature of
the project, what it’s about, what they will have to do in it, and any potential
risks and benefits they will face. It’s possible to waive informed consent, but only
under extreme circumstances; for instance, if you want to study hired killers who
would kill you if they discovered that they were being studied.
■Continuous consent. Test subjects must be informed that they can back out of
the project at any time for any reason, no questions asked.
■Confidentiality. Any information that would allow the subject to be identified
must be stored separately from the other test data, and it must never be published.
■Anonymity. Test subjects must be anonymous. Pseudonyms must be used instead
of real names, and if there is any question, even the respondents’ biographical
data must be modified.
■Freedom from deception. Test subjects must not be deceived unless it is absolutely
necessary, the deception is unlikely to cause major psychological trauma, and they
are debriefed immediately afterwards.
■Freedom from harm. Test subjects must not be subjected to any risk of physical
or psychological injury greater than they would experience in real life, unless it is
absolutely necessary—and then they must be warned in advance. “Psychological
injury” extends to embarrassing questions like “Have you ever been pregnant?”
■Protected groups. Children and adolescents, college students, prisoners, and other
groups have a protected status, because they cannot really give consent (children are
too young, and college students may believe that they must participate or their grade
will suffer). The IRB requires special procedures for studies involving these groups.In recent years, IRBs have expanded the scope of their review to include any research
that involves human subjects in any way whatever. Sometimes, this has resulted in over-
sight leading to “overreach.” For example, one review board asked a linguist studying
a preliterate culture to “have the subjects read and sign a consent form.” Another IRB
forbade a White student studying ethnicity from interviewing African American Ph.D.
students “because it might be traumatic for them” (Cohen, 2007, p. 1).
But what if the questions you want to answer are answerable only by deception?
Sociologist Erich Goode undertook several research projects that utilized deceptive
research practices (Goode, 1996a, 1996b, 2002). Refusing to submit his research pro-
posals to his university’s CORIHS guidelines, he took personal ads in a local maga-
zine to see the sorts of responses he would receive. (Though the ads were fictitious,
the people responding to them were real, and honestly thought they were replying to
real ads. They thus revealed personal information about themselves.)
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