institutional review board

(noun)

An institutional review board (IRB), also known as an independent ethics committee or ethical review board, is a committee that has been formally designated to approve, monitor, and review biomedical and behavioral research involving humans.

Related Terms

Examples of institutional review board in the following topics:

  • Ethics

    • To ensure the safety of participants, most universities maintain an institutional review board (IRB) that reviews studies that include human participants and ensures ethical rigor.
    • Several studies that, when brought to light, led to the introduction of ethical principles guiding human subjects research and Institutional Review Boards to ensure compliance with those principles, are worth noting, including the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which 399 impoverished black men with syphilis were left untreated to track the progress of the disease and Nazi experimentation on humans.

  • Protecting Research Subjects

    • Institutional review boards (IRBs) are committees that are appointed to approve, monitor, and review research involving human subjects in order to make sure that the well-being of research participants is never compromised.

  • Resocialization and Total Institutions

    • Within a total institution, the basic needs of a entire bloc of people are under bureaucratic control.
    • Institutions established to care for harmless or incapable people, including orphanages, poor houses and nursing homes
    • Institutions purportedly established to pursue some task, including colonial compounds, work camps, boarding schools, and ships
    • First, the staff of the institution tries to erode the residents' identities and independence.
    • Review Goffman's five types of social institutions and their functions, including their processes of resocialization

  • Change in Household Size

    • Other models of living situations that may meet definitions of a household include boarding houses, a house in multiple occupations in Great Britain, and a single room occupancy in the United States.
    • Since the 1970s, group homes have assumed the role of earlier institutions such as asylums, poorhouses, and orphanages.
    • In a boarding house, lodgers rent one or more rooms for a period ranging from one night to weeks, months, or even years.
    • Boarding houses usually offer bed and board, or at least some meals as well as accommodation.

  • Institutional Prejudice or Discrimination

    • These practices are embedded in the operating procedures, policies, laws, or objectives of large organizations, such as governments and corporations, financial institutions, public institutions and other large entities.
    • Though direct discrimination is illegal by United States law, many academics, activists, and advocacy organizations assert that indirect discrimination is still pervasive in many social institutions and daily social practices.
    • Board of Education Supreme Court decision.
    • Institutionalized discrimination often exists within governments, though it can also occur in any other type of social institution, including religion, education and marriage.
    • Examine the legal cases that had an impact on institutional discrimination

  • Study questions

    • Suppose that I was interested in drawing a graph of which large corporations were networked with one another by having the same persons on their boards of directors.

  • Understanding Social Interaction

    • The United States Congress is an example of a social institution that is clearly predicated upon social interactions.
    • By interacting with one another, people design rules, institutions and systems within which they seek to live.
    • Review the four types of social interactions: accidental, repeated, regular, and regulated

  • Elements of Socialization

    • Depending on the degree of isolation and resocialization that takes place in a given institution, some of these institutions are labeled total institutions.
    • In his classic study of total institutions, Erving Goffman gives the following characteristics of total institutions:
    • The most common examples of total institutions include mental hospitals, prisons, and military boot camps, though there are numerous other institutions that could be considered total institutions as well.
    • The goal of total institutions is to facilitate a complete break with one's old life in order for the institution to resocialize the individual into a new life.Mortimer and Simmons note a difference in socialization methodologies in different types of institutions.
    • When the goal of an institution is socialization (primary or secondary), the institution tends to use normative pressures.

  • The Milgram Experiment: The Power of Authority

    • The Milgram Experiment was also quite controversial, and considered by many scientists to be unethical and physically or psychologically abusive, motivating more thorough review boards and committee reviews for research with human subjects.

  • Courts

    • A court is a form of tribunal, often a governmental institution, with the authority to adjudicate legal disputes between parties, and carry out the administration of justice in civil, criminal, and administrative matters in accordance with the rule of law.
    • In most jurisdictions, the court system is divided into at least three levels: the trial court, which initially hears cases and reviews evidence and testimony to determine the facts of the case; at least one intermediate appellate court that hears an appeal of a trial court or other lower tribunal; and a supreme court, which primarily reviews the decisions of the intermediate courts.
    • A tribunal, in the general sense, is any person or institution with the authority to judge, adjudicate on, or determine claims or disputes, whether or not it is called a tribunal in its title.