Research Ethics

Over the next few posts, I am going to have a series on research ethics. Students are often surprised at the many rules that are required by the Institutional Review Board (IRB), why are they there? If you have a good understanding of the background, perhaps it will be easier for you to write your chapter 3 and to go through IRB review. 

Let's begin with where a lot of the rules came from – the National Research Act of 1974 which established the National Commission for Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. This committee's goal was to develop clear ethical guidelines involving human subjects in research. In 1978, the commission what has come to be known as the Belmont Report (because it was written while the group met at Belmont Conference Center near Baltimore). 

The Belmont report provided three principles that form the basis for how IRBs consider research proposals. Next time I examine the first Belmont principle: Respect for Persons. Do you have an issue or a question that you would like me to discuss in a future post? Would you like to be a guest writer? Send me your ideas! leann.stadtlander@waldenu.edu