VIII. Training of IRB Members and Departmental Coordinators
All Muhlenberg College IRB members (voting and ex-officio, including Departmental Coordinators) are required to complete OHRP approved training and to provide documentation of completion to the IRB Chair. All IRB members are expected to have familiarized themselves with 45 CFR, Subtitle A, Part 46, and The Belmont Report and understand the regulations, guidelines, and policies applicable to human subjects research. Once a year, the IRB shall review training requirements in these guidelines, policies and procedures with new members and Departmental Coordinators.
Currently, OHRP supported training programs do not distinguish between the experimental sciences, social sciences and humanities. As the American Historical Association has recently commented, the criteria for OHRP training and assessment demonstrate “a tendency to treat all research as if it was conducted in the experimental sciences." IRB recognizes that research conducted at Muhlenberg is carried out across a wide range of scholarly disciplines applying various types of research methods. For this reason, IRB members and Departmental Coordinators are encouraged to engage in further training that is specific to their professional discipline via workshops, online modules, books, articles, CDRoms, and videos.
Letter to the Office of Human Research Protections from the American Historical Association, September 29, 2008. accessed on February 5, 2009 at https://www.historians.org/.
