SECTION 3.4 Summary

• The purpose of an institutional review board is to protect the rights and welfare of the human subjects in a study. Institutional review boards review informed consent forms that subjects will sign before participating in a study.
• Information about subjects in a study must be kept confidential, but statistical summaries of groups of subjects may be made public.
• Clinical trials are experiments that study the effectiveness of medical treatments on actual patients.
• Some studies in the behavioral and social sciences are observational, while others are designed experiments.