Institutional Review Boards and Professional Counseling Research

Institutional review boards (IRBs) are responsible for regulating and safeguarding research with human participants in academic institutions in the United States. The authors explore (a) the historical impetus for IRBs, (b) the ethical values and principles as core components of the review process, and (c) the American Counseling Association's (2005) standards for ethical research. In many ways, IRB review and counseling research are complementary, yet some challenges and obstacles unique to counseling research also exist and are elaborated in the article. Implications for counselors initiating research projects and suggestions for implementation are provided.     

Human participants challenges in youth-focused research: perspectives and practices of IRB administrators

The purpose of this research was to understand institutional review board (IRB) challenges regarding youth-focused research submissions and to present advice from administrators. Semistructured self-report questionnaires were sent via e-mail to administrators identified using published lists of universities and hospitals an Internet searches. Of 183 eligible institutions, 49 responded. One half indicated they never granted parental waivers. Among those considering waivers, decision factors included research risks, survey content, and feasibility. Smoking and substance abuse research among children was generally considered more than minimal risk. These findings are consistent with those from a study conducted by Mammel and Kaplan (1995), which investigated IRB practices concerning protocols involving adolescent participants. IRBs and investigators need to become aware of regulations' flexibility to ensure adequate participant protection. Investigators need to limit jargon and assumptions about participants' understanding of research objectives.     

Integrating Motivating and Constraining Forces in Deviance Causation: A Test of Causal Chain Hypotheses in Control Balance Theory

ABSTRACT

A major innovation in control balance theory is the integration of motivating and constraining forces into a “causal chain” explanation of deviance. To test these relationships, this research presents a parsed model of the causal chain that focuses on the associations among control ratios, deviant motivation, situational provocations, constraint, and deviant behavior. Results from a first-person scenario testing hypotheses from this model show that, as predicted, control ratios affect deviance both directly and indirectly through motivating and constraining variables. While the full model explains about 39% of the variation in deviance, control ratios do not, however, show great explanatory power regarding variation in motivation and constraint.     

Academic Course Combining Psychological Skills Training and Life Skills Education for University Students and Student-Athletes

In Part II, we present two case studies of erotic transference and countertransference in sport psychology service delivery. We interviewed two seasoned practitioners, both with long histories of working with athletes. These sport psychologists represent two extremes of the spectrum when encountering the erotic in service delivery. One participant's story is about denial, suppression, and repression of anything that hints of the erotic in practitioner-client relationships. The other sport psychologist's story is about a nearly unbridled reveling in the erotic with a client. The practitioners are easy to condemn, one for ignorance and lack of awareness of self and others, the other for adolescent fantasies and objectification of his client. But those responses are facile and uncharitable. We present these two cases as examples, albeit extreme ones, of how truly complex the erotic is in service delivery. Their stories illustrate, in sometimes painful and graphic ways, what it is to be human, all-too-human, in our encounters with the people we serve.     

Social Welfare and the Psychology of Food Sharing: Short‐Term Hunger Increases Support for Social Welfare

Do politically irrelevant events influence important policy opinions? Previous research on social welfare attitudes has emphasized the role of political factors such as economic self‐interest and ideology. Here, we demonstrate that attitudes to social welfare are also influenced by short‐term fluctuations in hunger. Using theories in evolutionary psychology, we predict that hungry individuals will be greedier and take more resources from others while also attempting to induce others to share by signaling cooperative intentions and expressing support for sharing, including evolutionarily novel forms of sharing such as social welfare. We test these predictions using self‐reported hunger data as well as comparisons of subjects who participated in relevant online studies before and after eating lunch. Across four studies collected in two different welfare regimes—the United Kingdom and Denmark—we consistently find that hungry individuals act in a greedier manner but describe themselves as more cooperative and express greater support for social welfare.     

Development and Evolution of Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Depressed Adolescents

Since the 1980’s cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) has been developed and tested with adolescents experiencing depression. Early studies demonstrated that CBT was more effective than no intervention for young people with depressive symptoms. Beginning in the 1990’s CBT has been proven to be efficacious for adolescents with diagnosed depressive disorders, specifically Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). A series of increasingly challenging and methodologically rigorous trials showed that CBT was an effective intervention for mild to moderate MDD, and enhanced the benefits of anti-depressant medication, even for those adolescents who had already failed to respond to an initial medication. Simultaneously, some limitations of CBT were suggested by these studies. Results of CBT alone were not encouraging with severely depressed adolescents, and the combination of CBT plus medication was not uniformly supported. As CBT investigators worked with more challenging, complex clinical cases, such as depressed adolescents who were abusing substances or engaging in suicidal or self-harm behaviors, standard components of CBT were augmented by increased emphasis placed on emotion regulation, safety planning, and by more intensive outpatient treatment models. Newer developments include “third wave” models, which have shown initial promise.     

Neighborhood social disorder as a determinant of drug injection behaviors: a structural equation modeling approach.

Neighborhood environments are increasingly recognized as a contextual determinant of health, behaviors, and disease; however, the pathways through which neighborhood characteristics impact health behaviors are poorly understood. This article examines pathways to elucidate how neighborhood social disorder may lead to HIV transmission. Data are from a baseline survey of 701 injection drug users from the Self-Help in Eliminating Lethal Diseases Study, an HIV prevention intervention in Baltimore. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the pathways among social disorder, psychological distress, and drug injection behaviors. The relationship between disorder and injection behaviors in the models tested suggests that psychological distress is higher in more socially disordered neighborhoods, that distress leads to greater injection frequency and equipment sharing, and that injection frequency predicts equipment sharing.