Discussion:

The Institutional Review Board (IRB) is an ethics committee in the U.S. responsible for reviewing research projects in the human sciences (sociology, psychology, social and cultural anthropology). Using standardized procedures such as a risk-benefit analysis, the trained committee assesses whether research projects comply with ethical, moral, and institutional guidelines before approval. For research involving human participants – as is common in ethnographic fieldwork – the IRB provides a standardized protection framework, ensuring that the rights and well-being of participants are a priority.

In the U.S., researchers must obtain IRB approval before conducting research. Without approval, researchers do not receive funding or research permits. In Germany, the mandatory approval of ethics committees in human sciences is still under discussion.

Particularly in social and cultural anthropology, standardized ethical guidelines can create several issues, as ethics committees are often interdisciplinary and may lack specific expertise in ethnographic methods. This can misjudge critical aspects of participant observation, informed consent, and trust-building in data collection. Through standardized approvals, research flexibility is often lost, which is crucial in fieldwork where unforeseen circumstances frequently occur. This can limit the ability to gain deep and meaningful insights. Additionally, some scholars argue that standardized ethics approvals reflect a Euro-American perspective on ethical guidelines, which may contradict local socio-cultural understandings and limit research scope. Some researchers criticize the apolitical nature of ethics committees, which may restrict activist or engaged research approaches in anthropology. Bourgois (1990) highlights how IRB decisions can hinder research aimed at addressing power imbalances or social injustice.

„Most dramatically, the ethic of informed consent as it is interpreted by human subject review boards at North American universities implicitly reinforces the political status quo. Understood in a real world context, the entire logic of anthropology´s ethics is premised on a highly political assertion that unequal power relations are not particularly relevant to our research.”

(Bourgois,1990, p. 51)

Medical anthropologist Hansjörg Dilger (2015) raises concerns that Western ethics standards on health and illness may not align with local cultural understandings, making field studies difficult to conduct.

„Is it ethically appropriate to discuss sensitive information surrounding witchcraft accusations and/or the personal transgressions involved in illness etiologies associated with the breaking of taboos, when we had assured people that we are interested in their health seeking practices related to (a biomedical or public health definition of), for example, HIV/AIDS? […] Do we engage in acts of in-transparency and veiling as we trick people into talking about potentially different issues and (often much broader) definitions of health, well-being, and medicine than originally articulated in IRB protocols or informed consent forms?”

(Dilger, 2015, p. 6)

In summary, while ethics committees play an essential role in protecting research participants and ensuring research integrity, they also pose challenges and limitations. Researchers should always act within their social and moral responsibilities when conducting research.