The Mentor Model

In the mentor model, ethical oversight for each project is delegated to a student’s faculty advisor. Our discussions with colleagues suggest that this may be the most common global form of ethical review. In some cases, this review is informal, potentially consisting of only a conversation with the student about ethical best practices. In other cases, it may be more formalized. For example, the academic department may provide instructions or guidelines for the advisors’ review process, emphasizing particularly important ethical concerns such as the protection of vulnerable people. In addition, departments may collect and track data on where students are traveling and which resources they may have available (e.g., funding, local connections, and language skills). This latter version—a combination of an individual advisor with simple coordinating mechanisms and loose support from a broader institution—is a good place to begin for institutions that want to move beyond the mentor model.

The mentor model has significant benefits in terms of the low administrative burden of reviewing student projects. Student ethics oversight is built into the general advising process; therefore, mentors are already familiar with their students, their interests, and their skills. Students also receive individualized attention and support in developing research plans, including consideration about the safety and well-being of the research team. Finally, the system lacks a bureaucracy, so changes to research plans can happen swiftly without the long waiting times of ethics review boards.

However, these benefits must be weighed against possible costs. The mentor model introduces the possibility of general ethical principles being applied inconsistently across a program. In addition, faculty advisors do not always have direct experience in a specific country or topic—or they may not have any experience conducting field research. As such, it can be challenging even for best-intentioned advisors to give guidance or accurate advice on local ethics. Ideally, faculty advisors would seek advice from other experts familiar with a particular context, but this can place a significant burden on advisors.

Finally, without a systematic overview of the student body as a whole, there is no way for a program to track where students are traveling. This is important from an ethical perspective in terms of both student safety and avoiding over-research of particular communities or countries. Whereas some universities may require all affiliates to register with a travel office when conducting university business abroad, others do not. Without these resources and in cases of crisis, students may be entirely reliant on their advisor—and any personal travel insurance they have purchased—to assist them in an emergency.

The IRB Model

In the IRB model, undergraduate and master’s student research is reviewed by an external committee of experts under a system governed by national regulations and university standards. This model provides the advantages of systematic oversight of undergraduate and master’s student projects analogous to that of doctoral students and faculty members. The required paperwork induces students to consider the risks and benefits of their proposed research project for the research participants within the context of a transparent set of rules. The IRB model relies on experienced professionals, thereby creating a valuable system of institutional memory built on the cumulative experience of regularly evaluating research projects.

Administratively, the costs are not borne directly by an individual department but instead are centralized at the IRB. This can become prohibitively time-consuming for the IRB if there are numerous student projects that must be evaluated in a short period. IRB processes can operate slowly, with a month (and typically more) in processing time; depending on the progression of a program, IRB delays may prohibit students from executing their project on the schedule required for their academic program. In some countries (e.g., Sweden), an individual researcher must pay a fee for an IRB evaluation, which may be unaffordable for some students. In other countries, academic units pay the IRB on a per-project basis, thereby making the provision of an ethics review a significant budgetary burden.

IRBs and ethics review boards are not a panacea, however. Many scholars note that IRBs often serve the legal interests of the university first and foremost (Blee and Currier Reference Blee and Currier2011; Cronin-Furman and Lake Reference Cronin-Furman and Lake2018). In addition, the purview of IRBs is research subjects, not the research team, student safety, or issues of research design.Footnote ⁴ Furthermore, although projects may be reviewed by subject matter and disciplinary experts, ethics review boards may lack the expertise needed to evaluate risks in developing-world environments, which is particularly problematic in the context of political violence. Finally, scholars argue that the ethical requirements of the IRB are “a floor, not a ceiling” (Aufderheide Reference Aufderheide2016), which is further emphasized in the new American Political Science Association (APSA) Principles and Guidance for Human Subjects Research.Footnote ⁵

To the extent that these broad reservations about IRBs are valid concerns, they are doubly so for student researchers who lack the experience to compensate for IRB shortcomings. In particular, IRBs may not consider the differences in research qualifications and experience when evaluating the risks for a project submitted by experienced faculty—who arguably may be able to tolerate and manage more risk—versus novice student researchers. Finally, IRBs may interpret pertinent regulations such that there are significant loopholes for the least-experienced student applicants. For example, ethics review boards may not evaluate any projects by undergraduate student researchers or, in the case of client-based student projects, IRBs may determine that these projects do not meet the federal definition of “research” and decline to review them. However, in a system that primarily relies on IRBs for review, if the IRB decides a class of student research is ineligible, it again is unclear who should oversee these projects. Under these conditions, oversight often reverts to the ad hoc version of the mentor model.

Committee of Experts Model

In the committee of experts model (hereafter committee model), a department creates oversight at the level of the academic unit (often a department) composed of its own faculty members. This model has several advantages: it facilitates a more systematic application of ethical principles from case to case relative to other models (e.g., the mentor model) and generates institutional memory. As with the IRB model, the level of institutionalization ensures that students are provided with transparent rules and procedures. Both the application procedures and the criteria adopted by the committee for ethics approval can be tailored to the environment and therefore are more flexible than IRB rules. As a result, the purview of the committee model can be broader and oversight can include consideration of risks for both students and their research team. An institution can develop its own bespoke guidelines for student applications that place greater emphasis on a careful analysis of the context in which the project will take place and on the discipline in which the research will be conducted. The APSA Principles provide a set of overarching principles and a discussion of the applications that can serve as core guidance for a committee of experts.Footnote ⁶ Faculty members also may be more familiar with the risks involved with sensitive conflict contexts than IRBs, whose members may not understand particular countries or research methods.

The committee model also entails costs. Primarily, this process can be administratively burdensome for an institution and faculty members who comprise the committee. Although the freedom to set a high ethical standard in the committee model may allow for the rigorous consideration of student projects, it also means that the committee must achieve consensus on where to set that standard. The ethics of human subjects research—particularly in the context of political violence—often are difficult to assess, and even experienced experts may have vastly different opinions about what is or is not acceptable.Footnote ⁷ Grappling with these issues can generate fruitful debates among faculty members but also can induce stress and conflict among colleagues. Because the committee creates its own set of rules, it must be able to self-regulate internal disagreements. The necessity of applying comparable decisions across cases implies that the faculty involved can find common ground across their heterogeneous notions about ethical standards.

Furthermore, even professional IRBs have been shown to apply regulations inconsistently across institutions (Babb, Birk, and Carfagna Reference Babb, Birk and Carfagna2017). Committees of experts may be even more prone to subjective, uninformed, or inconsistent rulings regarding the ethics and safety of student-led research. This inconsistency may lead to either halting student projects that could have proceeded, or—potentially more troubling—allowing student projects to proceed that should not. Committees can develop mechanisms to ensure consistent and informed rulings, for example, by relying on the same basic principles every year (e.g., the APSA Principles), relying on precedents over time, building on the expertise of faculty members with interest in or experience with research ethics and design, and consulting outside experts for particularly challenging or contentious cases.

The Russian Doll Model

The Russian doll model is a hybrid of several other models involving different levels of oversight that are embedded within one another; therefore, this is only a brief description of the model’s advantages and disadvantages. A typical version of this model entails a student first submitting a brief research proposal to the department. If the proposal meets certain criteria that determine it to be higher risk thereby warranting additional consideration, then it must be evaluated in detail by another body—a centralized IRB, a local committee of experts, or both.

The Russian doll model allows a department to have a comprehensive overview of all student projects and to create a bureaucratic record of the types of research in which students are engaged. The rules are transparent, allowing the same standards to be applied to all students. By making a first cut, a department can reduce some transaction costs by omitting unproblematic cases and focusing resources on those projects that require careful consideration. This also has the advantage of engaging multiple decision makers, reducing variability in individual faculty members’ assessments.

However, this model also has disadvantages. It does not ameliorate the drawbacks associated with IRBs or committees of experts (depending on what the second evaluating body is) and therefore is best understood as a modified version of one of those two systems.

The Local Collaborator Model

In the local collaborator model, students are allowed to conduct human subjects research only in conjunction with an approved local partner, typically as part of an internship. In this model, students must receive buy-in from a local collaborator who hosts them in order for the project to move forward. This model may be combined with another model (e.g., IRB or committee of experts); however, in some cases, the buy-in from a local collaborator is a de facto substitute for other forms of ethical review.

Collaboration with a local partner entails numerous benefits that can support ethical research. Local collaborators are best placed to know about sensitive contexts and relevant actors and how they change on the ground. In areas that have experienced political violence, the context can shift dramatically from day to day and with it the safety of participants and the research team. Local collaborators are better equipped than novice students to evaluate the possible fallout of a changing political landscape. Local collaborators typically are invested in maintaining good relations with research participants and are more likely to veto potentially harmful interventions. Local collaborators typically also center considerations about the safety and well-being of the research team.

These benefits are conditional on the merits and organizational goals of the local collaborator. Local organizations can be profit-driven or biased or may fail to act in a student’s or a community’s best interests. They also may feel pressured to compromise their ethics when hosting students from prestigious and affluent foreign universities (Cronin-Furman and Lake Reference Cronin-Furman and Lake2018; Eriksson Baaz and Utas Reference Baaz, Maria and Utas2019). This places a burden on a student’s academic institution to vet local organizations before embedding students.

This type of collaboration may not be viable for practical reasons. Depending on the structure of an educational program, it may not be feasible for students to be abroad for the long duration that this type of combined internship/research project requires. Long periods abroad also require more funding than shorter fieldwork stints and may be prohibitively costly for students and programs. The advising process might suffer from students’ prolonged absences, and conflicts of interest may arise between the academic aims that must be met and how local collaborators would prefer that students spend their time. Finally, this model covers only a portion of the type of human subjects research in which students engage—namely, those involving fieldwork. Many students want to conduct interviews or focus groups in their home country or use online surveys or survey experiments. A system that is solely reliant on local collaborator buy-in for oversight would not encompass these projects.

Table 1 summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of each model, highlighting the value of each oversight system and the administrative burdens that each places on faculty mentors and programs.

Table 1

Models for Ethical Oversight of Student-Led Research