Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2011 Dec;101 Suppl 1(Suppl 1):S359-64.
doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2010.194340. Epub 2010 Dec 16.

Understanding community-based processes for research ethics review: a national study

Nancy Shore  1 , Ruta Brazauskas, Elaine Drew, Kristine A Wong, Lisa Moy, Andrea Corage Baden, Kirsten Cyr, Jocelyn Ulevicus, Sarena D Seifer
Affiliations

Understanding community-based processes for research ethics review: a national study

Nancy Shore et al. Am J Public Health. 2011 Dec.

Abstract

Objectives: Institutional review boards (IRBs), designed to protect individual study participants, do not routinely assess community consent, risks, and benefits. Community groups are establishing ethics review processes to determine whether and how research is conducted in their communities. To strengthen the ethics review of community-engaged research, we sought to identify and describe these processes.

Methods: In 2008 we conducted an online survey of US-based community groups and community-institutional partnerships involved in human-participants research. We identified 109 respondents who met participation criteria and had ethics review processes in place.

Results: The respondents' processes mainly functioned through community-institutional partnerships, community-based organizations, community health centers, and tribal organizations. These processes had been created primarily to ensure that the involved communities were engaged in and directly benefited from research and were protected from research harms. The primary process benefits included giving communities a voice in determining which studies were conducted and ensuring that studies were relevant and feasible, and that they built community capacity. The primary process challenges were the time and resources needed to support the process.

Conclusions: Community-based processes for ethics review consider community-level ethical issues that institution-based IRBs often do not.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Community Health Scholars Program Stories of Impact. Ann Arbor, MI: Community Health Scholars Program, School of Public Health, University of Michigan; 2001
    1. Green LW, Mercer SL. Can public health researchers and agencies reconcile the push from funding bodies and the pull from communities? Am J Public Health. 2001;91(12):1926–1929 - PMC - PubMed
    1. Institute of Medicine Who Will Keep the Public Healthy? Educating Public Health Professionals for the 21st Century. Washington, DC: National Academies Press; 2002 - PubMed
    1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Advancing the nation's health: a guide to public health research needs, 2006–2015. Available at: http://www.cdc.gov/od/science/PHResearch/cdcra/index_ad.htm. Accessed November 20, 2009
    1. O'Fallon LR, Dearry A. Community-based participatory research as a tool to advance environmental health sciences. Environ Health Perspect. 2002;110(2):155–159 - PMC - PubMed

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources