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Oral History Exempted From Federal Oversight
The U.S. Office for Human Research Protection (OHRP) of the Department of Health and Human Services announced in October that most oral history interviewing projects will no longer fall within the purview of institutional review boards, or IRBs. Such boards, which oversee research involving human subjects, derive their authority from federal regulations. Research experiments funded by any of seventeen different federal agencies must be preapproved and monitored by IRBs, and most universities require that all research involving human subjects, regardless of funding source, go through the IRBs. The AAUP joined other concerned organizations in urging the exemption for oral history.
IRBs were originally developed in response to serious ethical violations in clinical research. Their rules require that research subjects give informed consent, that their well-being not be compromised, and that the research in question be worth performing. In recent years, nonclinical research projects in areas such as anthropology, history, journalism, and sociology have increasingly come under IRB scrutiny, sometimes with inappropriate or detrimental results.
According to Linda Shopes, who represented the American Historical Association in discussions with the OHRP, historians have had to submit detailed questionnaires for IRB review prior to conducting any interviews, to maintain the narrators' anonymity, and to destroy their tapes or retain them in their own possession after an interview. Each of these constraints violates a fundamental principle of historical research, Shopes says. She notes that historians structure oral history interviews around a topic but deliberately leave questions open-ended so they can pursue important issues that arise. In addition, anonymous sources are often considered to lack credibility, and historians are professionally committed to open access to sources as a way of evaluating and building upon scholarship.
The American Historical Association and the Oral History Association have argued for several years that while oral history interviews are an important research source, most do not fall under the definition of "research" for purposes of IRB regulations. The regulations define research as "a systematic investigation, including research development, testing and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge." The history associations have pointed out that most oral history projects seek to explain a particular aspect of the past, not to create "generalizable knowledge.
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