IRB approval
I'm just finishing up my IRB (Institutional Review Board; someplaces also called a Human Subjects Committee) paperwork for my dissertation (political science, but using ethnography as my main method). I'm finding it incredibly difficult to translate the ethnographic process into IRB-appropriate soundbytes. I was wondering how other people have handled these issues in the IRB process:
1) How do you write lists of questions when you aren't yet sure what you are going to ask?
2) How have you handled issues of consent? When have you collected formal consent forms, and when have you been given permission to receive oral conset?
3) How have you talked about the informal conversations that occur in the process of doing an ethnography?
4) Have you had trouble with a biology/psychology focused IRB not understanding the ethnographic process? (All of the faculty on my school's IRB come from the Psychology department.) How have you explained it?
5) What sort of problems have you run into with the IRB process?
My advisor is not terribly helpful on these issues; he seems to think the IRB will just sort itself out. I'm too eager to be 100% into fieldwork to let this screw me up, so want to try to stop problems before they begin.
1) How do you write lists of questions when you aren't yet sure what you are going to ask?
2) How have you handled issues of consent? When have you collected formal consent forms, and when have you been given permission to receive oral conset?
3) How have you talked about the informal conversations that occur in the process of doing an ethnography?
4) Have you had trouble with a biology/psychology focused IRB not understanding the ethnographic process? (All of the faculty on my school's IRB come from the Psychology department.) How have you explained it?
5) What sort of problems have you run into with the IRB process?
My advisor is not terribly helpful on these issues; he seems to think the IRB will just sort itself out. I'm too eager to be 100% into fieldwork to let this screw me up, so want to try to stop problems before they begin.