The main purpose of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) is to ensure the proper and ethical conduct of your research. For this purpose, a highly detailed application is needed, describing your research focus and methodology in depth. The primary consideration with the IRB is to determine whether your research holds any potential harm or benefit for your participants, and whether or not you have made every reasonable effort to inform your participants of the goals of your research and minimize any potential risk.

Essentially, the approval of your IRB application grants you the permission to collect data, whether it be qualitative interview data you’re collecting for a phenomenological study, or quantitative survey data you’re collecting for a clinical data analysis.

One common difficulty with the IRB process lies in describing how the proposed instrumentation, or data sources, will work in conjunction with the proposed methodology to optimize your research experience and prevent any potential harm to your participants. For instance, you may need to reason that your survey questionnaire is an adequate choice based on its reliability and validity coefficients, or include a full discussion of how any physical or psychological harm would be mitigated for research involving participants that are considered vulnerable populations (e.g., children or military veterans).

Moreover, many review boards request additional supplementary materials in addition to the main IRB application, consisting of items such as informed consent forms for the participants, as well as permission letters for research sites under consideration. These items can be very time consuming and difficult to prepare without prior expertise.

Our dissertation help services for the IRB process are comprehensive, and one of our academic consultants can be in touch to discuss with you how we might be able to assist via email or phone.