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Trinkets is a section of the Voices of Equality blog. I am Debora Diniz, and I am here with you
every Saturday. Today, Trinkets opens a new series: How to survive
Institutional Review Boards.
The title is almost funny, but our conversation is pretty serious. Surviving the
bureaucracy of Brazilian Institutional Review Boards is a huge challenge for
researchers on Social and Human Sciences.
The review models were planned and made to fit biomedical research, which is a very
specific field in Health research. It involves clinical trials
in which the risks and damages of new drugs on people’s health are so serious that could lead them
to death.
When that review model was first thought, one of its key pieces was
the Informed Consent, also known as IC. The informed consent is the topic
of today’s Trinkets.
The IC follows a contractual model. It really is a contract. It’s a document where you fill
in your name, the researcher’s name, the risks and benefits of the study, the way the results will be
released and publicized, funding information, the name of the university and the IRB that reviewed the research.
This contract model was planned for research funded by pharmaceutical companies,
that is, for research with all those serious risks that I have just mentioned.
Albeit a good model for biomedical research, the informed consent was imported to us, who make
interviews, apply questionnaires, observe, and listen to life stories.
As you can imagine, in our researches with women who have performed abortion – abortion is
a crime in Brazil –, we have listened to confidential stories. Women that performed abortion are afraid
to tell strange people the truth about what they did, how they did it, where they had access to
the means to perform an abortion.
Imagine if we got to their doorsteps, knocked on their doors, and, before we even
established an empathic relationship with them, we presented a contract,
called Informed Consent.
Do you know how we have survived this IRB bureaucracy? We began using
the Oral Consent. We seriously informed those women about the risks and benefits
of the research, about who we were, about who funded us. But we followed a different consent model,
more appropriate to the kind of research we were conducting.
If the series “How to survive Institutional Review Boards” makes sense
to you, and if you have questions about how to survive them, write to us.
I will be very glad to come back here and talk to you.
See you soon.