Institutional Review Board and CBPR

Today’s JEDI moment brought up the difficulties our lab has had in the past of getting community-based participatory research (CBPR) past the Institutional Review Board (IRB). The IRB dates back to 1978, when the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research published a report “Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research” that established IRBs for medical research. We discussed the Flicker et al. (2007) paper, Ethical Dilemmas in Community-Based Participatory Research: Recommendations for Institutional Review Boards which argues that IRB should receive training on CBPR principles and that CBPR projects provide signed terms of reference or memoranda of understanding. We also elaborated on how CBPR projects should document the process by which key decisions regarding research design were made and how the communities most affected were consulted. Overall, we agreed that there needs to be an overhaul in the way IRB handles CBPR so that important work can get done as efficiently and ethically as possible