ABSTRACT
Research in exercise, health and sports sciences, even more than other forms of investigation involving human participants, has experienced rapid growth over the last three or four decades. As we noted in Chapter 1, in biomedical and behavioural research, past abuses and scandals resulted in legislative and regulatory responses such as the Nuremberg Code and the Helsinki Declaration. Subsequent to this, Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) or Research Ethics Committees (RECs),1 were formed on a widespread basis. These developments changed the face of research by requiring researchers to justify the goals and methods of their research on/with humans to peer investigators and to review group procedures prior to recruiting participants (Annas, 1991).
