Research Ethics Training for Community Research Partners

OVERVIEW

• Easily tailored to specific research and/or populations
• Program has been proven to be a successful, easy to implement, and enjoyable program

BACKGROUND

The Michigan Institute for Clinical & Health Research (MICHR) at the University of Michigan has developed an interactive training to engage and prepare community partners to both interact with Institutional Review Boards (IRB) and to perform ethical research practices in their community settings. There are already many hurdles for research that respectfully engages with communities, and through the use of interactive training, MICHR hopes to reduce or remove some of these hurdles. The goal of the training is to build community partners' capacities both to engage with the difficult academic review system and to make these regulations relevant to their own practices. MICHR hopes to increase the ethical quality of community-based research (vis-a-vis existing regulations) AND to promote a culture shift where IRBs come to recognize the unique ethical qualities and challenges faced by community-engaged research. This is why a large portion of this training focuses on facilitating communication between community partners and both their academic partners and institutional review boards.

This training is divided into three sections: Section 1 focuses on the history of current regulations and why they should be considered relevant and significant, at least in their core motivations, to community partners. Section 2 attempts to bring the informed consent requirements out of the legalistic language of IRBs and make them more intuitive and applicable in community settings. Exercises and activities challenge trainees to apply aspects of informed consent to situations they may face, and brainstorm potential solutions to them. Section 3 focuses on interactions with IRBs. We discuss the particular aspects of research with ethical importance to IRBs, how to communicate them to the boards, and provides sample documents that may be useful to both IRBs and community/academic partnerships in expediting review of their projects. 

All aspects of this training are available online for download. It can be used to facilitate a group session or individually.

ADDITIONAL DETAILS

ACADEMIC/NON-PROFIT/RESEARCH LICENSE: This license is for use in academic, non-profit, or research settings only. Purchase of this license requires authorization. Requests must be made from a valid academic domain email address (.edu or equivalent) and must include a description of the intended use of the exercise in the notes section of the form. Failure to provide this information will result in the denial of your request.

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