Sometimes, academia makes me want to cry (because there are too many bloody confusing rules and regulations and who the hell cares about the bloody IRB
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I am just annoyed because I don't know precisely what I want my paper to be about, but I know I at least want the option of publishing, which means I have to submit for IRB approval next week according to my professor, but I don't know what I'm doing yet, so it is just a lot of evil paperwork and banging my head against the wall right now.
Yes, new & different is good when you have time to do the extra poking around and don't need as many citations in order to fulfill requirements, but not so much right now when I am hoping for a slightly easier topic because my censorship paper is one of the aforementioned difficult ones. Also, I am just utterly baffled that everything I think of that sounds remotely interesting to me has apparently never (or very rarely) been done before. I mean, I could do a paper on gender but that's so boooring because everyone writes about gender. I'd much rather write about animal companions or translation issues or how audiobooks relate to oral folklore, etc.
The IRB is an ethics thing. They review your proposed research methods to ensure there is no harm to human subjects. It's really more for medical and psychological research, but if your research involves any human subjects at all, you need their approval. I cannot find out what happens if you don't get their approval though. Probably the respectable journals wouldn't publish your
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Aw, poor frazzleded lady! Any chance you could put a gender spin on a topic you really want to do, and then use the scads of available gender studies citations for that part?
Re: IRB -- Ah, at UD we called that the Human Subjects board, since you only needed approval for actually interacting with human beings. (I needed their approval when I was running a study tracking women's meat consumption over the course of their menstrual cycle, for example. It was all self-reported stuff, but Human Subjects had to make sure my survey wouldn't cause them emotional harm or something.) Are you going to be doing surveys/interviews for one of your papers?
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I am just annoyed because I don't know precisely what I want my paper to be about, but I know I at least want the option of publishing, which means I have to submit for IRB approval next week according to my professor, but I don't know what I'm doing yet, so it is just a lot of evil paperwork and banging my head against the wall right now.
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I'm not familiar with the IRB process -- why do you need their permission to publish your own work?
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The IRB is an ethics thing. They review your proposed research methods to ensure there is no harm to human subjects. It's really more for medical and psychological research, but if your research involves any human subjects at all, you need their approval. I cannot find out what happens if you don't get their approval though. Probably the respectable journals wouldn't publish your ( ... )
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Re: IRB -- Ah, at UD we called that the Human Subjects board, since you only needed approval for actually interacting with human beings. (I needed their approval when I was running a study tracking women's meat consumption over the course of their menstrual cycle, for example. It was all self-reported stuff, but Human Subjects had to make sure my survey wouldn't cause them emotional harm or something.) Are you going to be doing surveys/interviews for one of your papers?
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