ABSTRACT

This book invites readers to reconsider how writing studies researchers work with Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) on behalf of their communities and argues that engaging with IRBs during the research design process helps practitioners conduct research more quickly and effectively.

Using empirical data from both writing studies and extra-disciplinary contexts, Dr. Johanna Phelps presents findings from two discipline-wide studies, as well as metadata from two IRBs, to develop a principled engagement framework for writing studies researchers to interact with their communities. Phelps further examines the many facets of conducting research with human participants—from comprehending federal policy updates to pondering specific ethical issues to developing detailed research designs—and explores the confluence of ethics, policy, and methodology in a thoroughgoing philosophical investigation of writing studies as a public good.

This engaging and timely exploration of research design will be an important resource for scholars and students of writing studies; rhetoric and composition; technical and professional communication; cultural rhetoric; literacy studies; research design; research methodologies; research ethics; IRBs; justice; and critical theory.

Chapter 4 and Interchapter 4 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003082002-9 under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Chapter 6 and Interchapter 6 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003082002-13 under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

chapter |14 pages

Introduction

chapter |12 pages

First Interchapter

Defining and Historicizing Research with Human Participants

chapter |12 pages

Second Interchapter

Surveys as a Data Collection Method in Writing Studies

chapter 2|19 pages

Metadata

What We Know about Research with Human Participants

chapter |8 pages

Third Interchapter

“Medium” Data, Interviewing, and Corpus Analysis

chapter 3|22 pages

All “Spun Up”

Findings from Familiar and Unfamiliar Methods

chapter |7 pages

Fourth Interchapter

Collecting and Working with Census Data

chapter 4|18 pages

Don’t Be Too WEIRD

Research for the Future of Writing Studies

chapter |8 pages

Fifth Interchapter

Revisions to the Common Rule

chapter |7 pages

Sixth Interchapter

Questions to Consider when Designing Justice-Driven Research