Policymakers as Human Subjects

You may find it useful or necessary to interview policymakers or otherwise involve them in your research. When you are thinking about policy or systems level change, this is a valuable strategy. However, you may run into ethical issues, issues with your IRB or both. Let's look at some of them.

First you need to decide, are you going to run this through an IRB at all. I know what you are thinking, policymakers are human too! True. But as we all know there is formal research that is preconceived, and informal research, which might be an as-needed conversation with someone in the know. What is at issue here? 1) Actually protecting the rights of the individual policymakers and 2) Your ability to publish this aspect of your work in a peer-reviewed journal.

The problem that I have run across is that the role of a policymaker in society is poorly understood by IRBs. In one case, I felt very strongly that complying with the IRBs guidelines for a promise of confidentiality would be either dishonest and therefore damaging, or make the research completely unusable. As we know it doesn't take many variables to be able to pinpoint individuals. Even in a city the size of New York, if you are working on a specific issue and the policymaker has a strong well-known opinion or role, they will be very likely identifiable if quoted or described in anyway.

In some cases the best approach is a journalistic one. Journalists use a type informed consent also (but they call it a release form), and yes, like researchers some are more ethical than others. But there is rarely, if ever, a promise of confidentiality. The cooperative approach I like for policymaker interviews is a release that gives the policymaker a few choices. For example:
1) You may print or broadcast any quotations from this interview without consenting me prior.
2) You may print or broadcast quotations from this interview with my pre-approval.
3) You may not print or broadcast any quotations from this interview, or refer to me in publication, but may use the information I am giving you to better understand the issues.

Each of these selections has risks and rewards which should be outlined in the consent form. For example, risks to career or community status, or rewards to career or community status. Some may question the impact of this process on the quality of the data. But having worked with policymakers at varying levels, I have found they tend to be gaurded no matter what the circumstances, except for the few who run to the other extreme. That is just anectodal, and perhaps inconsequential. The first step to getting quality data is, after all, having a useful and honest informed consent process.

As IRBs are evolving to better respond to protection of communities, and still struggle to really understand action research and sometimes even qualitative research, lets throw another log on the fire and challenge IRBs to understand the risks and rewards of policy research.