[visionlist] IRB question

[Gislin Dagnelie]

Hello Mark,

Kafkaesque it certainly appears, but the IRB calls the shots.

Someone on the IRB may have worried that you would cut your subject 
payments (if you pay them by the hour) or some such detail.

It shouldn't take much effort or time to get the modification, so that is 
certainly preferable over trying to fight it.  I hope they won't require a full re-
review for such a small change; you can certainly as administrative.

And it will certainly teach you two lessons many of us have learned the hard 
way:  
1) The more innocent the research, the harder they'll try find at least 
something to show they've done their job and not just rubber stamped the 
protocol.
2) Never be any more specific than you have to be in an IRB application, 
especially on non-essential points from a human subject safety perspective. 
Example: If you think it's going to be an experiment lasting no more than 90 
mins, write "up to 2 hours" and you'll be covered. 

Hope you get it approved soon.  Best regards,

Gislin Dagnelie
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On 8 Apr 2010 at 14:36, Mark McCourt wrote:

Dear Fellow Psychophysicists:

I´ve encountered an interesting problem. We applied for and received 
IRB approval for a psychophysical experiment which we estimated 
would require 90 min for subjects to complete. Since obtaining the 
approval we have made some minor modifications to the experiment 
(i.e., reducing the number of levels of the independent variables and 
reducing the number of trials per condition) which has reduced the 
anticipated time to complete the experiment to about 60 min. I am 
informed by my IRB that I will need to file an amended protocol as a 
consequence of this (what seems to me totally innocuous and 
irrelevant) change. So, my question is: Is this a reasonable 
requirement or is it Kafkaesque? Thanks!

-Mark

**********************************
Mark E. McCourt, Ph.D.
Director, Center for Visual Neuroscience
Dale Hogoboom Professor of Psychology
North Dakota State University
Fargo, ND 58108-6050

V: (701) 231-8625
F: (701) 231-8426

http://www.cvn.psych.ndsu.nodak.edu/
http://www.psych.ndsu.nodak.edu/mccourt/xindex.htm
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