The Awareness, Perceptions and Attitudes of Faculty Users and Faculty Non-Users about the Role and Processes of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at One 1890 Land Grant Institution

The primary purpose of the study was tri-fold. The study was conducted to (1) determine differences between faculty users and faculty non-users awareness, perceptions and attitudes about the role and processes of the IRB on one 1890 land grant campus; (2) determine when controlling for status, rank, years of service, and age and the degree to which these variables contributed to the identification of the faculty profile for faculty users and faculty non-users of the local IRB at one 1890 land grant university; and (3) expand scholarly works and empirical literature related to the local IRB's role in human participant's research and its impact upon the university land grant community. This study was conducted at one 1890 land grant institution located in south central United States during the fall of 2007. The sample group consisted of 50 faculty who were self-identified as faculty users and faculty non-users of the IRB and reported their status, rank, years of service, and age. An electronic survey instrument was used to obtain data for this study. Secondary data was secured and analyses were conducted to assess the levels of awareness, perceptions, and attitudes about the role and processes of the Institutional Review Board (IRB), using the SPSS analysis package. Several procedures were employed to aggregate the data: frequencies and cross tabulations, analysis of variances of covariates (ANCOVA), and multivariate analyses of covariates (MANCOVA) to compare specific group mean scores of faculty users and faculty non-users, tenure and tenure track. The significance level was set using an alpha level of .05. The findings revealed (1) that faculty users and faculty non-users had differences between the levels of awareness and attitude; (2) perception remained high among faculty users and faculty non-users; however, (3) when controlling for years of service and age, there were significant differences between the faculty user and faculty nonuser groups.