Review Process

Step 0: Develop your initial ideas about your project

If you are looking at this page, it is probably because you are considering gathering data about people and/or analyzing data about people. Especially for undergrads at Minerva, there are two common contexts: informational interviews and user experience interviews. There are lots of instances of students getting great information in these two contexts, with relatively low effort and high reward.

Importantly, there is a third category that undergraduates sometimes think about pursuing but for which it is easy to vastly underestimate the costs and vastly overestimate the benefits: trying to systematically collect data in an observational study or experimental design, to make generalizable claims about humans. In short, doing new research to find new generalizable claims about humans is often done by established teams of experts (not by a single person), and even so a lot of published research does not replicate! You should deeply consider whether your efforts are best spent trying to do this vs. doing a more thorough job finding and evaluating evidence that already exists. More information on this topic can be found here [link not yet available, though it will be a modification of this previous resource linked here].

Step 1: Determine whether you need to contact the IRB

Imagine that you are writing a class assignment on the different challenges female CEOs face around the world. As part of this, you will cite peer reviewed publications, blog posts, autobiographies, and interviews published in magazines. You are also planning to do your own informational interview with three female CEOs. A sample sentence from your paper might read “Reflecting the scientific literature on the impact of micro-aggressions, Sarah Jones (CEO of Vulcan Industries) describes how when she started two years ago…”

Informational interviews of this sort are common at Minerva (and in many other contexts) and do not require any contact with the Minerva IRB. Note that there are plenty of best practices you should keep in mind when you do informational interviews (so that you achieve your goals, are aware of ethical considerations, etc.), and you should think very carefully about these and consult with experts when relevant. For example, it would raise many ethical considerations if an interviewee shared with you information that would harm them if it became public. Thus, the fact that you do not need to contact the MU IRB does not mean that there are not other things for you to consider!

Likewise, you might do user experience interviews, which really are just informational interviews of another sort. Perhaps you have developed a prototype for an app that would allow people to quickly identify the breeds of dogs they see, and you want some of your friends to try your prototype and give you feedback. In this case, your friends are in the same category as the female CEOs in the example above, and a sample sentence from a writeup might read “When 5 beta testers tried the prototype, a common piece of feedback was that it took too many taps to start a search, and so I refined the UX by adding a button on every page that led directly to the search page.”

Besides the above two cases (“journalistic” interviews and “user experience” interviews), nearly all other instances in which you are going to “get information from people” does require contacting the Minerva IRB.

Step 2a: Submit the Short Form

The first step in working with the MU IRB is to submit the short form that is linked here [link not yet available]. You can find a sample set of answers at this link [link not yet available]. In short, you should be prepared to submit the following information:

Name
Affiliation with Minerva
Minerva email address
Context in which you will be gathering and/or analyzing data about humans (class assignment, capstone project, research intended for peer-reviewed journal, etc.)
Who the people are?
What will their involvement look like (or what is the source of the existing data)?
What will your analysis involve?
What are some sample sentences that will result from all of this?
Approximate time frame for all of this

When you submit the Short Form, the IRB will determine whether your project requires additional paperwork and oversight. This is based on rules you can see in a lot of detail here but you do not need to be an expert about these (that is our job at the IRB!). Importantly, regardless of how your project gets categorized, you will do Step 3.

Step 2b: Submit the Long Form

After submitting the Short Form, it is possible that the IRB will determine that you must submit the Long Form, linked here [link not yet available]. This happens when we determine that your project has certain characteristics that make it “official Human Subjects Research” according to regulations we comply with as a USA-based institution.

Submitting this form will require significant work before you start it. This will range from preparing a plan for how you will securely store data, to how you will do an official “consent process” with your participants, to completing (and submitting evidence that you completed) online training for conducting research with human subjects.

Step 3: Continued Consultation with the IRB

As part of approving your project in either Step 2a or 2b, the MU IRB will establish a plan for consultation post-approval. For projects approved in 2a, much of this will be an additional service we offer (not typical of IRBs at other institutions) to help Minervans do excellent work that helps achieve their goals and be sensitive to ethical considerations. For projects approved in 2b, much of this will be to meet requirements on Minerva as a USA-based institution. For example, you will need to submit an official update when you finish your project (or every year, for projects that continue past 12 months).