Enculturating empathy: the ethical representation of institutional review boards

Abstract

As part of a preliminary literature review of research concerning the relationship between medical anthropology and bioethics committees, it became clear that Institutional Review Boards, a foundational component of research, had never been evaluated as a population with a characterizable identity. Some examples of contextual critiques and policy analysis with the goal of procedural efficiency were accessible (Gunsalus 2006; Fitzgerald 2009; Lederman 2006; Ozdemir 2009; Sontag 2012), but qualitative data on the local knowledge of IRBs as a population do not exist. A synthesis of theoretical orientations and methodological planning have been integrated to inform these novel research questions to learn more about the ethical decision-making process of an Institutional Review Board within a research university and hospital. Bioethical reasoning grounded in Western morals creates enough opportunity for cognitive dissonance because of the potential misapplication of ethics, but when decision-making authority is deemed objectively scientific, it can cause a power dynamic by being taken as self-evident. Considering these biomedical frameworks, research with human subjects is grounded in morality, making IRBs a relevant site of praxis for philosophical and scientific research. The overall purpose of this project is to identify the ethical values that define Institutional Review Boards as a population, evaluate the moral implications of biomedical governmentality in clinical research, and define common phenomenological understandings of moral praxis within positions of relative power.