Abstract
We describe the dilemmas we encountered in the informed consent process for an HIV prevention project targeting Black gay, bisexual, and non-gay identified young men. We highlight the complexities of applying informed parental consent procedures to sexual minority youth and identify some of the challenges that researchers who work with sexual minority youth face when they must balance the needs and rights of this population against the needs and rights accorded to parents by federal guidelines for protecting minor participants in research.
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Notes
We use the term Black rather than African American throughout this document because our staff, partners, and research participants included Africans, African Americans, and Blacks of Caribbean descent.
The work described in this article was conducted while the authors were in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. All references to our university and institution in the article refer to the University of Illinois at Chicago and not to the institutions with which we are each presently affiliated.
Sexual orientation and sexual identification are not among the diversity criteria for IRB composition required by federal guidelines.
All of the Black-focused sites were subcontracted through our site, so beholden to our IRB's ruling, as well as their own.
We would have had to file an IRB application with the DCFS and go through multiple internal DCFS review processes to obtain his guardian's signature.
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Acknowledgments
The research described in this manuscript was supported by grant U62/CCU513631 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Robin Lin Miller, PI and Joseph P. Stokes, Co-I). We gratefully acknowledge Bette Bottoms, Rebecca Campbell, Gary Harper, Miles A. McNall, and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on earlier drafts of this article.
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Robin Lin Miller is a biracial Black woman who identifies as straight. She was the Principal Investigator of the CITY Project in Chicago. She has been actively involved in the development of evaluation and HIV prevention capacity in agencies serving the gay, bisexual, lesbian and transgender communities for the prior 17 years. She is also a member of one of UIC's IRBs. She presently serves on an IRB at Michigan State University, where she is a current faculty member.
Draco Forte is a Black gay man who has a long history of activist and human service involvement in Black gay issues. He led the Community Health Advocate Network in Chicago and assisted in the development and oversight of other CITY Project interventions. He is presently an associate with the Huron Consulting Group.
Bianca Della Marie Wilson is a biracial Black lesbian woman and an activist in the Black gay, lesbian, and bisexual community. She coordinated the collection of data for the Chicago site of the CITY Project. She is now a faculty member at California State University, Long Beach.
George J. Greene is a Latino gay man who has worked in the Chicago gay and lesbian community for the past 15 years. He was a senior research assistant on the CITY Project. He is now an investigator at Working for Togetherness in Chicago.
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Miller, R.L., Forte, D., Wilson, B.D.M. et al. Protecting Sexual Minority Youth from Research Risks: Conflicting Perspectives. Am J Community Psychol 37, 341–348 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-006-9053-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-006-9053-4