Use the IRB to Guide Your Foster Care Research Posted on March 1, 2006 Cassandra Simmel (bio) considers the IRB to be an important advisor.

I think IRBs should be seen as guides and as advisors and not as a legal hurdle that has to be navigated or jumped over. It's important to remember that IRBs are obviously very institution specific, so what might go over very well at one institution, the identical kind of project could be denied at a second institution.

The federal guidelines, that's what they are; they're guidelines. There aren't limitations spelled out. There aren't real strict laws that are spelled out. There's just a lot of fluidity in how these guidelines can be interpreted, so in that sense, I think IRBs can be very helpful in helping the researcher think through what are some of the ramifications of asking about these sensitive questions. What are the ramifications about trying to approach this population? What happens if you find disclosures in secondary data sets? If the foster youth suddenly disclose additional types of abuse that you didn't know about? Some of these things as a researcher you can be so into your own project, so entrenched in that, that you may not have thought about some of these broader issues.

I'd like to think that IRBs can just help you to think through some of these, and then use your IRB. Go to your IRB; have a game plan in mind. Just try to think through these things as much as you can in advance, and say this is how you would handle it. This is the systematic protocol if a foster youth suddenly discloses that she's contemplating suicide. What do you do? If you were working solely with a youth and her biological parent, naturally you would go to the parent. If it's a child in foster care, well the foster parent is not the legal authority or has limited legal authority, sometimes can't even get medical services for that foster youth. So do you tell the foster parent who may be extremely well-intentioned but just may not have the wherewithal or the legal requirements needed to get the services needed. Do you go to the child welfare worker? Well, the child welfare worker, as we all know, has caseloads of 90 children. Are they going to be able to attend to this very serious circumstance? It's just a very different system that you need to think about.

Even if it's just one child on your project where this happens, that is still one child that you need to be very very cautious about.

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