IRB watch

I resonate well with this sentiment. My recent graduate experience with our university's IRB was indeed filled with futility. My research was extremely simple. It had subjects using a website, either alone or in pairs. They did nothing extraordinary and there was no intervention aside from tasks given them to perform and whether they were paired or not. It was exactly the same scenario that cubicle workers encounter when helping one another look for something on a computer. It was an action performed every day by millions worldwide. Yet I had weeks of difficulty trying to answer the IRB's insistence that I identify harms to the subjects, when I could frankly imagine none. Embarrassment at being a subject? Carpal tunnel? Not getting along with the paired-up other subject? Yet it was also an IRB staffer who finally worked through the problem with me on the phone and enabled me to pass IRB scrutiny. Scale seems to matter; good people combining to produce monstrosities.