Activities Likely to Be Defined as Research

• Focus groups designed to elicit individuals’ opinions about a common theme
• Queries of individuals regarding experiences and responses to similar types of events; information is aggregated to draw inferences about general issues
• Bringing middle school students into a University setting to test elements of a new educational curriculum
• Interviewing children in a school about with which classroom peers they like to play
• Abstracting medical outcome information from a set of existing medical records
• Abstracting school outcome information from a set of existing school records
• Secondary analysis of datasets that include individually identifiable information
• Recording observations by an informant embedded in a specific cultural milieu

The activities listed above should not be deemed to be “research” simply because they are included on this list. This list is a small subset of examples of activities that are “likely” to be defined as research for IRB purposes. 
 

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