As an IRB member at my university, the key initial question is whether the email archive has been published (i.e., whether it is publicly available). As a general rule, content analysis of pre-existing, publicly available, materials do not require IRB review as it does not involve interaction with research subjects. If there is a question about whether the material is publicly available, you might want to go ahead and file an IRB - and the key concern will be in making sure you don't use materials in a way where "private" comments are divulged in a way that can be linked to a specific individual. I think that doing things like stripping names and other identifiers would help approvals, or stressing that you're using the text in ways that don't report specific comments, then there is less of a potential problem, and you may be able to not have to track people down for retroactive consent. Still, if you have questions about the ethics, or your institution's procedures, it's good to check with your local research compliance officer. Ben Bates University of Tennessee ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:38:22 -0400 From: Dhanaraj Thakur <dthakur@gatech.edu> Subject: Re: [Air-L] question about IRB and content analysis of mailing list To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20081028215920.027d2bc8@gatech.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed hey all, this might have come up before so pardon me if this is repetitive. I am interested in doing a content analysis of texts within an email archive. and I was wondering how to deal with IRB issues in this case. specifically, I am focusing on the text and not the authors. if I did need informed consent its seems impractical to get given the number of participants (several hundred) and age (over 5 years) of some of the emails. what should I do in that case? also, what would be the approach if the archive is available publicly or if its private? finally, are there any other major IRB requirements that I should consider in this type of exercise? thanks Dhanaraj Dhanaraj Thakur Ph.D. Student School of Public Policy Georgia Institute of Technology ------------------------------