What are the three types of IRB review?

There are three types of IRB review: Full Board, Expedited, and Exempted Review. The review type is defined by the level of risk to participants associated in the research. Figure 1 illustrates the three types with a brief description of each.

Figure 1: Types of IRB Reviews

Research requires IRB approval [Full Board / Expedited]

Research that involves human subjects and is intended to be published, then it requires IRB review and approval. Four types of research are as following:

• Research that uses humans as test subjects for the development of new devices, products, or materials.
• Data collected through intervention or interaction with individuals. These includes the types based on deployment methods
  • Online surveys
  • Paper surveys
  • Telephonic Surveys

One-to-One interviewsEach type of survey is based on the frequency of deployment:

• Cross-sectional studies
• Longitudinal surveys
• Retrospective survey

• Studies using private information that can be readily identified with individuals, even if the information was not collected specifically for the study in question.
• An analysis of data that has been identified individually in order to generalize knowledge about categories or classes of subjects. 

   
Research does NOT require IRB approval [Exempted]

• Data collection for administrative purposes within departments, schools, or other organizations within the University.
• Customer satisfaction surveys and service surveys. When researchers need data collected by companies, approval from the data collection entities is required. 
• Information-gathering interviews where questions focus on things, products, or policies rather than people or their thoughts regarding themselves.
• Course-related activities will guide the program coordinator in making decisions. Documents related to course activities used for research purposes should obtain IRB approval. 
• Biography or oral history research involving a living individual that is not generalizable beyond that individual
• Conducting procedures on behalf of an external agency under an independent contract. Among the examples are personnel studies, cost- benefit analyses, customer satisfaction studies, biological sample processing (for a fee and not for any credit or authorship), public park usage, information technology usage, and software development. Figure 2 shows the process of the determination IRB review type.

All terms used in the chart are defined in the glossary of appendix A.
Figure2: Process for Determination of type of required IRB review