Institutional Review Board

Rollins College established the Institutional Review Board (IRB) to protect the rights of human participants and to promote professional research. The goal of the IRB is to work with administration, faculty, staff, and student researchers in a collegial way to enhance the validity of their research by helping to ensure that projects involving human participants adhere to established ethical, moral, and legal standards. The IRB also serves to weigh any potential risk to research participants against the benefits that the proposed research may provide. Human research is any activity developed for the purpose of collecting and organizing data from human participants in such a manner as to test hypotheses, address research questions, or contribute to generalizable knowledge. The IRB reviews proposals to confirm that the project design provides safeguards for research participants. 

Questions regarding research projects approved by the Rollins IRB should be directed to Dr. John Houston, Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Rollins IRB at irb@rollins.edu.