Institutional Review Boards: Human Subjects and Their Texts

This interactive poster serves to showcase the evolving roles Institutional Review Boards (IRB) have in research on texts, both physical and digital. Over time, the awareness of and adherence to IRB has grown in technical and professional communication research and scholarship. Part of this growth can be attributed to need (research is more and more being conducted in places such as hospitals, where privacy is vital). However, recent cases, such as the PANS article regarding Facebook and emotion manipulation, indicate that the user experience (UX) of certain products call traditional IRB policies in to question. In particular, questions about text production, dissemination, and subsequent research on texts indicate that IRB policies have not evolved to meet the demands of present research culture. This poster suggests that the narratives and extensions of IRBs preclude and exclude serious consideration of texts by their very design and representation to researchers. This poster examines how IRBs communicate policies to technical and professional communication researchers, and, in light of new research methodologies, researchers can develop extensions to IRB protocol internal to the field. In doing so, this poster aims to ensure ethical treatment of human subjects both as participants, and as authors of texts, in research.