Historians who work on events that occurred within living memory bridle at having to submit their projects to institutional review boards
An oral historian sits down with a survivor of Hurricane Katrina to hear a first-person account of the storm. Is their encounter a conversation about a historical event, or is that historian performing research on a human subject?
The scholar will have one answer. It may not jibe with the verdict of his or her college's institutional review board, whose mandate is to make sure that research involving humans stays within ethical bounds, regardless of the topic. Over the past decade, it has become increasingly likely that before the historian ever switches on a tape recorder, the board will insist that he or she put the project — or protocol, in IRB-speak — through the kind of vetting that was designed to keep biomedical and psychological experiments on the straight and narrow.
The debate cuts to the heart of what historians do, especially if they study events that took place within living memory. And it is becoming more urgent, as events like Katrina and the attacks of September 11, 2001, inspire more scholars to turn to the recent past and to oral history as a means of recording and understanding it. But as oral history becomes more popular and more pervasive, both as a research tool and as a pedagogical technique, it has also come under more scrutiny. And that worries scholars who are not used to being on the regulatory radar.
As the American Historical Association has documented in a series of periodic updates in its monthly newsletter, Perspectives, IRB's have over the past several years begun to pay closer attention to all research projects that involve human beings, no matter what the field. Ten years ago, when Linda Shopes was president-elect of the Oral History Association, she remembers only "a handful of complaints" from oral historians about IRB's. Since then, with colleges increasingly wary of potential lawsuits, oral historians have found their work caught up in regulatory reviews.
Some historians, especially those who work at colleges where oral history is well established, are quickly turned loose by their IRB's. Others get tangled up in a review process they find cumbersome and unfriendly. They accuse review boards of a failure to understand the nature of historical research and of an overzealous commitment to a one-size-fits-all system of review. In such cases, a scholar who specializes in, say, the civil-rights movement may find that, in terms of how his research is viewed by the university, and the paperwork he or his students must complete, he may have more in common with a colleague in the medical school than he does with the medievalist down the hall....
Read entire article at Jennifer Howard writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education
The scholar will have one answer. It may not jibe with the verdict of his or her college's institutional review board, whose mandate is to make sure that research involving humans stays within ethical bounds, regardless of the topic. Over the past decade, it has become increasingly likely that before the historian ever switches on a tape recorder, the board will insist that he or she put the project — or protocol, in IRB-speak — through the kind of vetting that was designed to keep biomedical and psychological experiments on the straight and narrow.
The debate cuts to the heart of what historians do, especially if they study events that took place within living memory. And it is becoming more urgent, as events like Katrina and the attacks of September 11, 2001, inspire more scholars to turn to the recent past and to oral history as a means of recording and understanding it. But as oral history becomes more popular and more pervasive, both as a research tool and as a pedagogical technique, it has also come under more scrutiny. And that worries scholars who are not used to being on the regulatory radar.
As the American Historical Association has documented in a series of periodic updates in its monthly newsletter, Perspectives, IRB's have over the past several years begun to pay closer attention to all research projects that involve human beings, no matter what the field. Ten years ago, when Linda Shopes was president-elect of the Oral History Association, she remembers only "a handful of complaints" from oral historians about IRB's. Since then, with colleges increasingly wary of potential lawsuits, oral historians have found their work caught up in regulatory reviews.
Some historians, especially those who work at colleges where oral history is well established, are quickly turned loose by their IRB's. Others get tangled up in a review process they find cumbersome and unfriendly. They accuse review boards of a failure to understand the nature of historical research and of an overzealous commitment to a one-size-fits-all system of review. In such cases, a scholar who specializes in, say, the civil-rights movement may find that, in terms of how his research is viewed by the university, and the paperwork he or his students must complete, he may have more in common with a colleague in the medical school than he does with the medievalist down the hall....