AISSR

Research Ethics & Integrity

AISSR is committed to the ethical conduct of research involving human participants. Research activities are conducted in accordance with applicable ethical standards, institutional policies and relevant regulatory requirements.

APYCF Institutional Review Board

The Asia-Pacific Youth Culture Foundation (APYCF) maintains a registered Institutional Review Board (IRB) dedicated to the ethical oversight of research involving human participants. The Board’s ethical review framework is guided by the Belmont Report (1979), including the principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice, and the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki (2024 Revision) where applicable.

The Board’s review procedures are informed by the human research protection standards established under 45 CFR Part 46 (U.S. Common Rule), subject to applicable regulatory requirements and institutional policies. Ethical oversight emphasizes informed consent, equitable participant selection, risk minimization, confidentiality, research integrity, and the protection of participants’ rights and welfare.

APYCF’s Institutional Review Board has been formally approved by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP), under Institutional Organization Number IORG0012914 and IRB Registration Number IRB00015260.

What is covered

Each heading below is a standing practice. Where a formal policy document exists it will be linked from here; until then these are statements of practice and not application forms.

Human Research Protection

How participants are protected: eligibility, consent, withdrawal, and the separation of identifiers from responses at every stage of a study.

Ethics Review Applications

What a protocol submitted to the board must contain, and the order in which it is reviewed. Information only — there is no application portal on this site.

Informed Consent

What a participant is told before agreeing, in language they can act on, and what they keep a copy of.

Research Data Privacy

How response data is stored, who can reach it, and how long it is kept.

Protocol Amendments

How a change to an approved protocol is recorded and re-reviewed rather than absorbed quietly into the study.

Research Integrity

Authorship, conflicts of interest, analysis conducted as planned, and what happens when a result cannot be reproduced.

Adverse Event Reporting

How harm or distress to a participant is reported, to whom, and within what time.

Research Ethics Decisions

Where a decision of the board is recorded once there are decisions to record.

There is no ethics application portal on this site. A researcher wanting to submit a protocol writes to [email protected] and is sent what the board requires.