Doing Economics

5.6 Human Subjects
Many of the sponsored projects we work on as economists involve human
subjects. This can be as simple as recruiting people for a survey with such
innocuous questions as “What is your age?” to surveys with more intrusive
questions like “Do you have HIV?” to downright invasive surveys where
blood samples are taken from subjects to measure the level of iron in their
blood.
In all cases where a sponsored project involves human subjects—and for
economists, that is almost always the case—you will have to seek the
approval of a recognized institutional review board (IRB), usually the one
at your institution.
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To make a long story short, ethical protocols
surrounding research with human subjects emerged as a byproduct of the
Nuremberg trials, which were held by Allied forces after World War II to
prosecute not only Nazi leaders, but also Nazi scientists who had conducted
abhorrent experiments with human subjects. The Nuremberg Code, which
presents principles for ethical research with human subjects, was created so
that such inhumane experiments with human subjects would never take
place again.

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Figure 5.1
Sample budget
Now, most economic research involving human subjects is a far cry from
what the Nuremberg Code sought to prevent, but because economists often
collect sensitive data from or experiment with human subjects, the work
that we do falls under the broad umbrella of human subjects research, and
an economist interested in running a lab experiment to study how people
behave in a public goods game is under the same restrictions as a team of
medical doctors who are seeking to test the effectiveness of a new vaccine.

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If you have never sought IRB approval before, you will first have to sit
through about an afternoon’s worth of training on how to approach human
subjects—the history of human subjects research ethics, what counts as
human subjects research, what you can and cannot do with human subjects,
and how you should handle confidentiality issues. There are organizations
that provide this training. The CITI program, for example,
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offers such
training for researchers at subscriber institutions (universities, for the most