So one of the major things that has happened to me in the past month or so is that I had to go through the process of getting my study approved by the IRB. The IRB is the Institutional Review Board, which every academic institution has and it is designed to make sure that the studies people do are not harming participants or putting any undue stress on them. Obviously, most studies don’t come anywhere near doing bad things to people, but every now and then in the past, somebody conducted a study that was eventually seen as unethical. Thus, now we have IRB’s to make sure that this does not happen.
I wasn’t worried about my study not being approved because of any unsavory things I was doing to people, but it was still a nerve-wracking process. The application requires you to explain your study to people who do not have any knowledge of your field. This can be rather difficult because usually the studies designed are rather technical and have drawn upon a lot of previous empirical and theoretical work. Interestingly, the IRB doesn’t really want to know about the theoretical and empirical underpinnings, which can often justify why certain things are being done, but they just want the details of your own study.
I was one of the first people in my cohort of friends to get this application done and so we were all interested in whether we would be accepted or not. We had heard horror storied about the IRB not being very favorable to social science research because they do not seem to understand the necessity of some of the procedures we as social scientists used. However, the acceptance letters from everyone I know who has submitted just kept coming in and we soon realized we were grossly misinformed. Perhaps it was a rumor the IRB started themselves to try and scare people into being very precise and honest about what is going on so they don’t have to worry too much about the applications they receive. Nonetheless, I was approved to begin conducting my research for my Master’s Thesis. So that was very exciting and a really good process to go through.
It seems that there are processes in place in grad school that are absolutely terrifying when you first are going into them. However, you soon realize once it is all said and done that it wasn’t even as hard as you thought it might be. Maybe the fear you get does get you to work a little harder or try that much more to get it done right. Obviously it will never be perfect but it seems that there is some leeway in perfection. I think you can scare yourself into thinking that things have to be perfect before you turn them in but you soon realize it just isn’t true. That doesn’t mean don’t try your best but so long as you have tried your best, people seem to be forgiving of small missteps or lack of clarity here or there. It is pretty interesting all-in-all but just really relieving to have been approved.
