IRB Problems and Solutions in Health Communication Research

In this article, we aim to contribute to current literature on the difficulties that social scientists can encounter with IRB review, but with a focus on the distinct challenges that health communication scholars might face in dealing with IRB review boards at their own institutions and elsewhere. Although health communication researchers, like other communication researchers, can expect to face many of the same challenges that their social science colleagues face during the IRB review process, the researcher narratives we present in this article suggest that health communication research presents some distinct challenges because an important component of the subject matter that we need to investigate as health communication scholars occurs in the highly protected, private space of the health care provider-patient encounter. Our goal is to present a series of examples in which health communication researchers were able to find solutions or workarounds. In every case that we present, t