Institutional Review Board (IRB) 101: Introduction to Human Subjects Protections at UNI
Training Quiz – Helen Harton
Does the IRB need to be notified?
1. You want to do an analysis of archival data (personally identifiable information about
people’s attitudes and happiness) collected at the University of Michigan that is publicly
available on the web.
2. Your project involves a secondary analysis of a public use dataset that does not contain
personal identifiers (i.e., US Census data).
3. Your survey has already been reviewed and deemed exempt from further review. Your
original method of approaching people at the airport, however, isn’t working so well and you
decide to also hand out the survey at the mall.
4. You are conducting a survey for Cedar Falls Utilities that will only be used internally to
determine changes in departmental budgets.
5. You want to observe public behavior (how men vs. women carry their books) in the Union.
6. You are collecting data for a class project that you may also submit to a conference.
7. You are doing an archival analysis of death records from 2000 – 2005 to examine whether
there is a relationship between length of hospital stay and age of death in Black Hawk county.
8. You are doing a survey of employees as part of your internship that you plan to use for your
thesis as well.
9. Your study of elementary school children (already approved by the IRB) is going well, but
you aren’t getting enough participants at the two schools you originally said you’d use, so you
decide to run the study at two additional schools.
10. You are collecting data from adults about their memories of 9/11 for a class project that will
only be presented in class.
11. Your study last year was approved as exempt from further review, but you want to collect
additional data using the same procedures and population.
12. You are doing a meta-analysis, examining the effect sizes found in previously published
research.
13. You are conducting a survey of human resource personnel that only asks what type of
company they work for, how many employees they have, and which of ten family-friendly perks
their company offers.
14. You conduct a research project using the archival health records of a mental health practice
as part of your practicum and with the practice’s permission. You want to also submit the
results (with all identifiers removed) to a conference.
15. Your study in which you interview adolescents about their tv viewing habits has already
been approved under expedited procedures, but you now want to add a second questionnaire
about their attitudes toward their parents.
16. You would like to interview Kelly Clarkson after her concert at UNI to discuss her upcoming
tour.
17. You would like to observe kindergarten children on the playground to determine the nature
of the social interactions from the beginning of the year to midyear. You are turning in your
observations as a class project.
18. As an employee of the university dining services, you want to conduct a survey on students’
feelings about the dining services. The results of this survey (if they are positive) will be used
on a website promoting the dining services to students and parents.
19. You want to analyze coded data on the eating behaviors of middle school children that was
previously collected by another investigator at UNI. The other investigator had obtained IRB
approval for the original data collection.
20. As an active researcher, you completed a study last year regarding the attitudes of college
students concerning abortion and submitted a paper that was published in a referred journal.
The project has been closed and now you want re-analyze the data from a different perspective.