Moving Away from American IRBs Posted on January 7, 2008 Imposing American ethics standards in other countries should not preclude local customs, says Kenneth H. Rubin (bio).

One of the things that stands in the way of doing research culturally and cross-culturally has to do with IRB. So Institutional Review Boards have to be set up on different campuses that match the American way of guarding ethical considerations in other communities. One of the more difficult things to think about is who are we to say that what we believe is appropriate and ethical and approvable, is what other government or other countries can do?

So for example, our first work in China we didn’t have an IRB in Shanghai. It never existed, and when we wanted to enlist the children and the families in the study, we went to a school, approached the principal. My colleagues all knew the school system and knew the principals, and so the principal then mandated that all the families participate.

Boy, from an American perspective, that would be considered totally inappropriate and unethical, but this was a different country and we went along with it. Now there are developing, over time, reconsiderations of deploying IRBs, but again, they’re not going to match the IRBs that we have in this country. There aren’t going to be community members, for example.

And so it creates, it precludes, in a way, the opportunity to do cross-cultural research that’s funded, and so what I do have to say, then, is that every one of my international collaborations has been funded by local government. It has not been funded through the NIH or National Science Foundation. And maybe things will change, and maybe things will — if we move away from IRB, because I do think that we need to have — we need to protect our participants, certainly, but we need to protect them in ways that are locally-approved rather than American, nationally-approved.

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