Standard Bearers: Qualitative Sociologists’ Experiences with IRB Regulation

In response to the system for regulating research with human subjects, researchers have raised two apparently contradictory concerns: that IRBs are excessively inconsistent (often raised by biomedical researchers), and that they are excessively standardizing (often raised by qualitative interview researchers). Why does standardization appear as the dominant theme in qualitative researchers’ experiences with their IRBs? And how do qualitative researchers experience standardization in their IRB encounters? We focus on IRBs role as regulatory bureaucracies, which typically rely heavily on standardized communication and decisions to process information and make large numbers of decisions in a timely manner. We explore the role of standardization in IRB regulation of qualitative research in an analysis of semi-structured interviews with 26 qualitative sociologists from six research universities and three liberal arts colleges in the Northeastern United States. In a regulatory regime oriented toward the norms of experimental research, these frictions resulted partly from a lack of appropriate standardized language and decision-templates, but also from the inherent difficulties of applying standardized decisions to work that is unpredictable, unique, and difficult to routinize.