ABSTRACT
Although Institutional Review Board (IRB) oversight is not required from a regulatory standpoint for all types of research, there are many advantages of such oversight for practice-based researchers. Unfortunately, lack of access to IRB review can be a significant obstacle for private practitioners who wish to conduct research and, surprisingly, this issue has received minimal attention in the literature. One potential solution to this problem is the development of independent IRB’s that are designed specifically to support practice-based researchers who operate outside of traditional academic research settings (where most IRBs are housed). This chapter providers a step-by-step model for how to create such an IRB, based on the author’s experiences of forming and running the Behavioral Health Research Collective (BHRC) IRB, a non-profit IRB whose mission is to provide ethical oversight of practice-based research in the area of behavioral and mental health. Detailed descriptions are provided of the key tasks and processes necessary to start and operate an IRB, and are further illustrated with examples from the BHRC IRB member’s experiences.
