June 2024

Volume 1, Number 1

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Dilemmas and Challenges with Institutional Review Boards in Criminology Research

Shujing Shi

University of Cambridge

Vincent Cheng

Hong Kong Polytechnic University

 

The significance of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) in upholding research ethics cannot be overstated. They play a crucial role in ensuring research participants are protected from unethical research (Nicholls et al., 2015). In criminology and criminal justice studies, such protection is vital, as many of the research participants come from vulnerable populations, such as those who were crime victims, ex-convicts, and individuals suffering from mental conditions like substance use disorder. In addition, the process of data collection, which requires participants to revisit traumatic experiences, poses a risk of inducing physical and mental distress, potentially leading to long-term negative consequences, as seen in notorious studies like the Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram experiment. Likewise, data collected from the participants might not only expose their stigmatized identities but also expose previously undiscovered criminal behavior, resulting in legal consequences for the participants (Bucerius and Copes, March/April, 2024). To mitigate the potential detrimental impacts of their works to the participants, researchers developed protocols to guide the data collection, analysis, and presentation process. IRBs are institutional attempts to ensure such protocols that protect research subjects properly prepared.

Despite of these ethical safeguards, various obstacles researchers face in seeking an IRB approval were identified in the first thematic meeting of the ACCCJ Mentorship program. This research note discusses major issues involved in ethical dilemmas in data collection, and bureaucratic hurdles and requirements of the journal publishers, pertaining to crime and criminal justice research in the Greater Chinese regions.

 

Ethical hurdles

Maxfield and Babbie (2017) posit that the principal ethical challenges facing criminology and criminal justice research revolve around ensuring voluntary participation, preventing harm to participants, and avoiding deception. As technological advancements proliferate and social platforms alongside corresponding online activities expand, the attention criminologists devote to the internet, or more broadly, digital realms, ignites vigorous debates over ethical considerations and evaluations. The surge in digital space research underscores the importance of addressing ethical and legal concerns, with confidentiality, anonymity, and informed consent standing out as pivotal issues (Eynon et al., 2008).

A particularly pressing ethical dilemma concerns the methodologies employed in internet research within criminology, which often involve “black hat” or “grey hat” tactics for gathering sensitive information or engaging directly with users under false pretenses. Such practices raise critical ethical issues regarding participant consent (Elovici et al., 2014). While consent is undoubtedly crucial for research integrity, obtaining genuine consent from participants who are involved in illicit activities or who value their digital anonymity is fraught with practical and ethical hurdles. The very act of seeking informed consent could influence the behavior of participants, potentially affecting the research outcomes and the authenticity of the data collected. This is especially pertinent when studying user behavior, as the awareness of being observed or studied can alter natural interactions within the digital environment (Elovici et al., 2014). A notable case highlighted in the meeting involves the collecting of data from fraud scripts by joining and observing closed chat groups on platforms such as Telegram. Furthermore, the legitimacy of informing platform operators about ongoing research poses a polarized issue. Investigations into illegal cyber activities, such as those occurring on darknet markets, present ethical quandaries. While transparency about research intentions could compromise the study’s objectives or even violate the terms of service of the platforms involved, potentially damaging their reputations. On the other hand, conducting research without such transparency raises ethical concerns about deception.

The concern for privacy, as observed by both IRBs and researchers, often appears to be less pronounced than other ethical considerations, according to Winter and Gender (2024). Nevertheless, the distinction between public and private data becomes critical when conducting research in the digital era. While the accessibility of public data might lead to assumptions that such information requires little to no ethical scrutiny or IRBs oversight, research involving private spaces, such as private accounts or friends list, prompts debates over privacy intrusions (Elovici et al., 2014). Even for those classified as ‘open source’, which is presumed to carry explicit permission from data owners for further use and analysis, remains a contentious issue as the implicit consent for data use and analysis in public forums is debated (Tripathy, 2013).

Lastly, the principle of ‘do no harm’. The potential for harm to identified individuals raises questions about researchers’ responsibilities upon encountering harmful or criminal behaviors online (Franzke et al., 2020). The ethical scrutiny and IRBs review processes vary with the research methodologies employed on the internet. Notably, methods involving direct participant contact, such as virtual or visible ethnography, necessitate stringent ethical considerations. Researchers engaged in these practices—such as accessing publicly inaccessible information or joining closed chat groups—must ensure informed consent and provide detailed research information (Gupta, 2017). Additionally, researchers’ safety becomes a paramount concern for IRBs, addressing risks such as online harassment, exposure to violent content, mental welfare, and potential inducement of illegal activities. The ethical debate also extends to the use of deceptive identities in online research, with opinions divided between those who justify deception in studying hostile communities and those who deem it largely impermissible (Gupta, 2017; Barbosa & Milan, 2019). One instance where research has been successfully conducted with full disclosure of the researchers’ true identities in the context of the dark web, please see Barratt and Maddox (2016) for more details.

Critiques of IRBs in the realm of digital criminology research are widespread, highlighting several key issues that detrimentally affect the field. A primary concern among researchers is the perceived lack of distinction by IRBs between online and offline research methodologies. This leads to the application of traditional ethical principles across diverse research contexts without adjustment, resulting in misinterpretation of research methods and the nature of the data being collected. The challenge of obtaining consent is particularly problematic, where expecting individual consent is unrealistic and overly burdensome. Such requirements not only pose logistical obstacles but also risk the exclusion of researchers from these digital domains (Winter and Gender, 2024). This points to a need for IRBs to adapt their evaluative frameworks to better align with the unique challenges and opportunities presented by digital criminology research.

 

Bureaucratic hurdles

The second hurdle concerns the requirement in the US-based institution that all principal investigators (PIs) and their collaborators need to obtain IRB approval from their respective institutions. Yet, there is a lack of standard criteria governing IRBs across these institutions.

Cross-country collaboration is common, if not necessary, for comparative criminologists, including US-based criminal justice researchers who have their major research focuses on the Chinese context. Since issues related to crime and criminal justice are seen as politically sensitive, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for non-China-based researchers to be directly involved in data collection in China. Instead, non-China-based researchers, including US-based researchers, often collaborated with and relied on scholars affiliated with Chinese academic institutions for data collection. However, while IRBs in the United States require the PIs and their collaborators to obtain approvals from their own academic institutions, such approval systems in Chinese academic institutions could operate according to different logic, criteria, and principles. In particular, as studies on crime and criminal justice are deemed politically sensitive in China (Wei et al., 2023; Xu et al.,2013), those internal reviews in China-based institutions might focus more primarily on the implications of the studies on political stability and government legitimacy. However, for researchers’ host institutions in the United States, it is not clear whether such a review system might be seen as adequate or accepted.

In addition to cross-country collaboration, cross-disciplinary collaboration could also make IRBs application difficult. Cross-disciplinary research has been increasingly advocated in the academic world, a movement that has made its way into criminology and criminal justice. A primary obstacle within such collaborations stems from divergent viewpoints regarding IRBs across different academic domains (Morris, 2015; Friesen et al., 2019; Winter and Gender, 2024). The perception and attitudes towards ethics and ethical concerns in research can differ markedly between the social and natural sciences, complicating collaboration efforts (Tartaro and Levy, 2014). This divergence further leads to varying IRBs requirements and standards among partner institutions, often resulting in challenges during the IRBs application and review processes. For example, research that involves analyzing open-source data through machine learning techniques, such as natural language processing, exemplifies these challenges. In the social sciences, employing publicly available legal documents that contain personal information might not necessitate stringent IRBs scrutiny when it keeps anonymization (Wilkinson and Thelwall, 2011). However, the same research could require rigorous ethical evaluation and oversight in a computer science department due to concerns regarding human subject involvement, data confidentiality, and the potential of personal identification. Such discrepancy between disciplines can lead to delays in progress, heightening the risk of unsuccessful cross-disciplinary collaborations. This underscores the importance of clear communication and establishment of shared ethical standards.

Moreover, agencies and institutes involved in cross-disciplinary partnership could further complicate the IRBs process. An illustrative case is an opium research project in Delaware, which involves collaboration between the public health sector and criminal justice system. Here, a conflict between Delaware law and university Business Associate Agreement resulted in restricted access to certain data (Anderson et al., 2021). The growing bureaucratization within IRBs can, to some extent, foster an unethical research environment. The concept of ‘consensual censorship’ describes situations in which researchers design data collection methodologies aimed solely at obtaining IRBs approval, with both the researchers and the IRBs aware that these methodologies will not be implemented as stated (Bledsoe et al., 2007). Additionally, researchers may alter their applications to superficially align with IRBs expectations, while disregarding their actual research procedures (Mollet, 2011; Winter and Gender, 2024). Such practices not only jeopardize the integrity of the research but also highlight the need for a reevaluation of current IRBs protocols to ensure they facilitate, rather than hinder, ethical research conduct (Vitak et al., 2017).

 

Journal hurdles

Other than hurdles imposed by the universities or research institutions, the requirements stipulated in the journal publishers may also make IRBs application difficult. For example, the editorial board of Criminology, the flagship journal of the American Society of Criminology, recently introduced a new measure to enhance data transparency through the sharing of research data on public databases. This update mandates researchers to upload their data to a public database, enabling researchers worldwide to verify the analysis and reliability of the findings. According to the members of their Editorial Advisory Board, this new practice aims to enhance the ‘reproducibility, replicability, robustness, and generalizability’ of the research published in the journal.

While this requirement may be well-intentioned, some researchers, particularly those who employ qualitative research methods, may have concerns over ethical principles of such a requirement. For example, sharing criminological qualitative data, such as testimonies of criminals regarding their criminal behavior, especially when their criminal act has not been detected, on a public database could create serious ethical dilemmas. Consequently, stipulating in an IRB application that self-report data by vulnerable criminal population will be shared in an open access database may jeopardize its chance of passing an IRB review.

It is both ironic and unsurprising to see that practices aimed at improving the quality of academic research, such as disclosing raw research data to the academic community, can create obstacles in the process of obtaining an approval from the IRB. This situation highlights the long-standing tension between researchers’ ethical and professional responsibilities to generate rigorous, reliable, and valuable knowledge for the academic community, and at the same time, to minimize the risks and protect the well-being of their research participants. Striking a balance between these two competing values can be challenging, especially in criminological research. How to effectively enhance data transparency while protecting research participants’ privacy and rights requires both deliberated theoretical and practical considerations.

In conclusion, this research note discussed several ethical dimensions and bureaucratic intricacies associated with conducting academic research and publishing. Stemming from the ACCCJ mentorship meeting and the relevant literature, we recognize the IRB’s pivotal role in safeguarding ethical standards in research. For researchers in the fields of criminology and criminal justice, especially those engaging with vulnerable populations, it is imperative to strictly adhere to relevant legal guidelines and ethical standards. Besides that, we advocate for IRBs and academic journal publishers to periodically update and reassess their guidelines. Such revisions should reflect the evolving needs of contemporary research, ensuring not only the validity of studies, the protection of the research subject, but also the practicality and efficiency of the IRB review process, particularly in the context of the digital age. For global collaborative research, we support the establishment and continued development of IRBs across diverse socio-cultural environments, and a researcher-initiated, not government-initiative, approach in building the collaborative ecosystem. Additionally, we encourage researchers involved in cross-country and cross-disciplinary collaborations to proactively seek advice and support from their counterparts and administrative bodies within the IRB and ethical committees’ domain, and be actively involved in the leadership role in helping to create, improve and implement IRB-liked institutions to benefit all cross-national collaborative researchers.

 

References