Yesterday, I delivered my survey printout, thesis proposal, and a question-by-question defense of the survey instrument to my department chair. He will hopefully review it over the next few days and then I will submit it to the University of Washington’s Institutional Review Board (the IRB). The role of the IRB is to make sure I’m not engaged in exploitative or dangerous research….okay, they have a broader and more nuanced role than that, but I am tired.
Here’s the deal with IRB. I have applied as “exempt,” which means my proposal should not require full review, which can take upwards of 2 months in some cases. My advisor and I agree that the project should be exempt because the survey will be fully anonymous (no identifying information will be collected on respondents) and because it is not likely to inflict harm (physical, psychological) on participants.
At least I am hoping it does not; if you took the survey, you know that there was a screening instrument in there that asked some fairly direct questions on your mood and coping abilities. More discussion on that instrument later, but if for some reason IRB decides that this is too invasive, I may be in trouble. Brain Child is set to print on May 28th, and if I don’t have IRB approval to go ahead with my project by then, I am sunk.
I am trying to not dwell on this, since most everyone I know has found a way to make it work, even if they were working their fingers to the bone and communicating with IRB on minutiae down to the wire. But as it turns out, I am eight weeks pregnant. I am living in that fuzzy-headed, early pregnancy zone where only about half of my daily hours are actually productive. The rest of the time I’m staring into space. Anyhow, the last two, three days have seen me push myself a bit harder than my body wanted to go, and this morning I am paying the price.
Last comment, and it is based on the assumption that all goes well: I hope that there was nothing upsetting to you about taking the survey. There were two portions of it that consisted of standardized instruments — question series that have been studied and validated extensively and shown to provide reliable information on respondent state-of-mind. The problem is, these standardized questionnaires often feel a bit awkward to answer. My goal in designing the survey was to make it interesting and maybe even fun to go through, but I know those questions must have bogged you down. I am sorry about that, but it was important!
