When you need IRB review
If your project involves living people as research subjects — surveys, interviews, focus groups, usability tests, experiments, or analysis of identifiable private data about people — and you intend to generate generalizable knowledge (a thesis, a conference paper, a publication), you almost certainly need Institutional Review Board review before you collect any data. A class assignment that stays in the class usually does not; ask your instructor.
Get the training first
You and your faculty adviser complete a human-subjects research ethics training (a set of online modules) before submitting. It has to be current. This is where you learn informed consent, minimizing risk, protecting privacy, and the special rules for vulnerable populations — it is not busywork.
Submitting
Through the online IRB system: a protocol describing your question, who your participants are and how you will recruit them, exactly what you will do to them, your consent process and form, how you will store and de-identify data, and the risks and how you minimize them. Your adviser must be listed and approves the submission. Build in weeks — review is not instant, and reviewers usually ask for revisions.
"Exempt" is a category, not a bypass
Many low-risk student studies (anonymous surveys, benign behavioral tasks, existing public data) are determined exempt from ongoing review — but only the IRB can make that determination, and you still submit and wait for it in writing before starting. "I thought it was exempt so I already ran it" is a compliance problem.
Consent, in practice
Participants must understand what they are agreeing to, that it is voluntary, that they can stop, and how their data will be handled — before they take part. For a survey that is usually a consent statement on the first screen; for an interview, a signed or verbal-and-documented consent. Do not deviate from your approved consent process.
Changes and problems
Any change to an approved protocol — a new question, a different population, a new recruiting method — needs an amendment approved before you make it. If something goes wrong (a data breach, a participant harmed or distressed), report it promptly. The IRB and the research-compliance office help; the goal is protection, not punishment.
Fictional information
UW–Porter Falls is a work of parody. Every office, person, building, phone number and statistic on this page is invented; nothing here describes a real institution or a service you can actually contact.