When I was doing a small research project with mothers talking about their experiences of pregnancy, birth and the early days of motherhood, my initial response to the ethics form question about whether or not the reserach may induce pschological or physical destress in participants… I thought “well maybe” you never know, one of the participating mothers may have become emotionally destressed when going over a traumatic birth story – I know I couldn’t talk about giving birth to my daughter for about a year after giving birth, and had someone specifically asked me to go into detail I may have become distressed at recalling some parts of the medical-type intervention used. So I initially responded honestly to the question on the ethics form that yes, it is possible some participants may become distressed.

It was then suggested by the ethics committee that I have to hand counciling service contact information to give out to any participants that seemed to become distressed. But how odd that would have been in situ! Imagining talking to these participants of which most were friends and giving out counciling information if they became a little teary during an interview seemed so entirely inappropriate… it would have damaged the repore I had with the partcipants at the very least – not to mention to suggestion of emotion instability the gesture would have implied. Anyway, in the end I decided to just tick “no” to the question on the ethnics form.

I guess the question on the ethics form would really require a “yes” only in case of some pyschological research projects or medical research…. so we can’t be to broad/honest in our thinking when filling out these forms…. I think it would make sense to have seperate human ethics forms for different disciplines, what applies to biomedical realms in one way may apply to human sciences another. But then I guess even that would become confusing in cases where research has a foot in each area such as medical anthropology…

Good luck with your IRB process. The sense I’m getting from everyone is that the experience can be incredibly different between institutions. I just tell all my students to thoughtfully weigh the IRB’s demands/ questions/ suggestions. If they seem reasonable, agree to them. If they don’t seem reasonable, argue (very politely) with them. You lose ground for not only yourself but your entire discipline when you give in to biomedically-grounded conceptions of ethics that are inappropriate (i.e. not going to lead to more ethical research) for different disciplines or methodologies. As Rena Lederman argues, we can see these encounters as a chance to educate our IRBs. It takes more time to do the back-and-forth, but it will be much more satisfying when you finally do get ethics approval.