ABSTRACT
Political science research is limited by funding and should certainly be limited by ethics. As a political scientist trained in the United States in experimental methodology, I quickly learned about the role of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) in evaluating and approving my research. I had to take exams that proved I understood the ethical principles guiding research with human subjects and the historical reasons for their existence. As a political science scholar now working in Mexico, I started investigating the role of ethics reviewers in Mexico when I began applying for funding. I found there was no legal framework to regulate the ethical component of social science research. Thus, I started teaching my students the ethical concerns we should take into account when conducting fieldwork, as no one evaluates that component of our research. Because of my familiarity with the IRB procedures in the United States, I am well aware that the procedural issues we deal with as social scientists are not distinct from the biomedical ones. These differences between the social sciences and biomedical research methods and questions should evolve into different review processes (Seligson 2008, Singer and Levine 2003). In my experience going through IRB procedures at different universities in the United States, research in the social sciences can be significantly delayed if reviewers use the same standards to evaluate biomedical and social science research applications, where in most cases the latter’s scope of intervention is not as broad as in the former.
