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Gatekeepers play an important role in research conducted with children and youth. Although qualitative researchers frequently discuss institutional and individual gatekeepers, such as schools and parents, little attention has been paid to the role that Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) play in determining who is allowed to research particular populations and the ramifications of these decisions for findings involving children and youth. In order to examine this role, we compare negotiations of two researchers working on separate projects with similar populations with the IRB of a large Midwestern university. In both cases, it is likely that board members used their own personal experience and expertise in making assumptions about the race, social class, and gender of the researchers and their participants. The fact that these experiences are supported by findings across a wide range of IRBs highlights the extent to which qualitative research with children is changed (or even prevented) by those with little knowledge of typical qualitative methodologies and the cultural contexts in which research takes place. While those such as principals, teachers, and parents who are traditionally recognized as gatekeepers control access to specific locations, their denial of access only requires researchers to seek other research sites. IRBs, in contrast, control whether researchers are able to conduct research at any site. Although they wield considerably more control over research studies than typical gatekeepers, the fact that they are housed in the institutions at which academic researchers work also means that we can play a role in their improvement.

This study examines the determinants of enforced tax compliance behavior of Malaysian citizens where trust in tax authorities is assumed to be a mediator. Quota sampling method was used to select a sample of 340 participants to participate in a survey. A two-step structural equation modeling (SEM) process was adopted to test a framework comprising 13 hypotheses. Model fit was initially measured using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) while model specification was applied in the second stage to test the structural relationship. The mediating effects of trust in tax authorities were tested via Baron and Kenny (1986) approach, bootstrapping, and AMOS AxB estimand. The findings confirmed that trust in government, trust in tax administrator, power of Inland Revenue Board of Malaysia, and awareness influence enforced compliance. However, tax morale and tax amoral behaviors do not influence enforced compliance. The findings suggest that citizens would fulfill their tax responsibilities if they believe that tax authorities are effective in tax administration. Trust in government fosters trust in the tax authorities. This study contributes to existing literature by confirming the factors that affect enforced tax compliance.

I want to read the controversies and scandals surrounding Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) within a critical pedagogical, discourse. Ethics are pedagogies of practice. IRBs are institutional apparatuses that regulate a particular form of ethical conduct, a form that may be no longer workable in a transdisciplinary, global, and postcolonial world. I seek a progressive performative cultural politics that enacts a performance ethics based on feminist, communitarian assumptions. I will attempt to align these assumptions with the call by First and Fourth World scholars for an indigenous research ethic (Smith, 1999; Bishop, 1998; Rains, Archibald, & Deyhle, 2000). This allows me to criticize the dominant biomedical and ethical model that operates in many North American universities today. I conclude with a preliminary outline of an indigenous, feminist, communitarian research ethic. This ethic has two implications. It would replace the current utilitarian ethical model that IRBs utilize. It argues for a two-track, or three-track IRB model within the contemporary university setting.

The purpose of this research was to explore common conceptions about the underlying nature of teachers’ organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). Two studies were conducted to examine the dynamic and subjective nature of the boundary between teachers’ in-role and extra-role behavior. Study 1, based on a sample of 205 teachers from 30 elementary schools in Israel, examined this boundary between teachers’ in-role and extra-role behaviors through teachers’ career stages. Study 2, based on a survey of 29 principals, 245 teachers, and 345 parents from 30 elementary schools in Israel, investigated how different stakeholders in schools (principals, teachers, parents) conceptualized teachers’ in-role–extra-role boundary. Results from these two studies attest to its dynamic and subjective nature. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

David Carpenter argues in favour of Internal Review Boards taking a virtue ethics approach to their reviews of research proposals. Carpenter views principle- and code-based approaches as in competition with virtue ethics, and he describes reliance on principles and codes as neither necessary nor sufficient. We agree with Carpenter’s thesis that a virtue ethics approach would be beneficial and even necessary for exemplary review of research proposals. We disagree with Carpenter, however, about the weight that should be given to principles and codes. We defend here our view that principles and regulations are indispensible to ethical review of research, in spite of the fact that principles often conflict with each other. In those situations, the reviewer’s virtue of practical wisdom is necessary to adjudicate between competing ethical claims.

Purpose – In this chapter, we address the ambiguous nature of parental consent requirement decisions for the purpose of conducting minimal risk research of at-risk youth.

Methodology/approach – We evaluate current guidelines, which are used to determine the appropriateness of parental consent waivers, review related literature, and offer a case study to understand some of the resulting dilemmas that arise when seeking approval and researching youth in potentially abusive and neglectful situations.

Findings – We offer the researcher, practitioner, ethics committee, and policy maker new strategies to aid in the determination and application of parental consent waivers for minimal risk research participation among at-risk youth populations.

Conducting research with children and youth has become increasingly challenging in recent years. At times these difficulties come in the form of restrictions by Institutional Review Boards, funding agencies, and parents. Additionally, changes in youth culture and behavior, specifically regarding online activities and digitally mediated communications, impact the access that researchers have to children and youth communities in significant ways. In this chapter, I propose that the use of an emerging methodological technique, digital ethnography, may provide researchers with new data sources on children and youth culture. Digital ethnography combines ethnographic techniques of observation, participation, and interview with content analysis to collect rich data about online behavior, norms, expectations, and interactions. This technique not only provides researchers with sources of data that allow insight into youth culture by acknowledging the increasing importance of online and digital interactions in youth culture but may also address some of the concerns raised by IRBs and other interested parties about conducting research with children and teens. This chapter provides practical and ethical considerations of this method, as well as a discussion of limitations of data collection and access as it highlights new ways of studying youth culture, using emerging data collection techniques in innovative research projects.

Current practice, reified through typical IRB guidelines, has its roots in traditional positivist frameworks about research. The positivist research paradigm is traceable back to Enlightenment epistemologies, which emphasized the fact-based, value-free nature of knowledge (Christians, 2000; Cunningham & Fitzgerald, 1996; Howe & Moses, 1999; Muchmore, 2000). Christians (2000) suggests that researchers who were grounded in positivist approaches used utilitarian perspectives on research ethics. The utilitarian approach suggested that a single set of moral considerations could guide all inquiry; these considerations were outlined in a generally accepted code of ethics that emphasized informed consent, privacy/confidentiality, and accuracy, and that opposed deception in research. Many of these conventions were codified in national legislation in the USA beginning in 1974, in response to several experiments that had mistreated research participants (Hecht, 1995; UCRIHS, 2004). According to Christians (2000), ‘Three principles, published in what became known as the Belmont Report, were said to constitute the moral standards for research involving human subjects: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice’ (p. 140). These principles were intended to ensure that people participated in research voluntarily and anonymously; that researchers protected the well-being of their participants; and that both the benefits and the burdens of research be distributed equitably (Christians, 2000). This legislation established requirements for IRBs that would review and monitor federally funded research conducted by universities and other institutions. Most universities and other research-conducting institutions have since expanded the purview of their IRBs to monitor all institutional research – not just that which is federally funded (Hecht, 1995).

How do transnational social movements organize? Specifically, this paper asks how an organized community can lead a nationalist movement from outside the nation. Applying the analytic perspective of Strategic Action Fields, this study identifies multiple attributes of transnational organizing through which expatriate communities may go beyond extra-national supporting roles to actually create and direct a national campaign. Reexamining the rise and fall of the Fenian Brotherhood in the mid-nineteenth century, which attempted to organize a transnational revolutionary movement for Ireland’s independence from Great Britain, reveals the strengths and limitations of nationalist organizing through the construction of a Transnational Strategic Action Field (TSAF). Deterritorialized organizing allows challenger organizations to propagate an activist agenda and to dominate the nationalist discourse among co-nationals while raising new challenges concerning coordination, control, and relative position among multiple centers of action across national borders. Within the challenger field, “incumbent challengers” vie for dominance in agenda setting with other “challenger” challengers.

While some of us enjoy engaging in many forms of bioethical activity, including philosophical analysis and debate, clinical ethics consultation, and empirical research, only the latter matters much to the practicing physician. Practically minded, most doctors have little concern with fine moral distinctions when faced with a patient's request for assistance in dying or a pharmaceutical company's offer to attend a product “consultation” session at a first class resort in addition to an attractive fee for participation. Physicians want to know what facts might bear on ethical questions they confront, how ethical conflicts that have an impact on patient care can be understood and resolved, and whether research reveals consistently clear, helpful findings. The following discussion offers some examples of how empirical research related to bioethical issues has provided evidence and guides for physicians at both individual-patient care and policy levels, and further reviews areas that warrant continued research attention.