Human Subjects Research - a query to linganth subscribers

[Rachel R. Reynolds]

My dissertation will be an ethnography of communication and I'm looking for
some precedents here for an application to my institution's Institutional
Review Board (IRB).  If you've been through this, you know that most IRB's
are based on a one-shot (literally!) biomedical model, and ethnographic
work doesn't fit well with the federal guidelines for what constitutes
informed consent and how one goes about obtaining it.

Does anyone have an official IRB application designed for fieldwork,
especially fieldwork designed to get natural spoken discourse data?  Or can
anyone direct me to the homepage of an IRB board that is
ethnography-friendly?  Does anyone have a really good piece on informed
consent under "ethnographic conditions"?  I would very much like to hear
about it as I try to get my IRB to understand what my project is. . .

Thanks for any good leads.

Rachel Reynolds
PhD Candidate
Specialization in Language Literacy and Rhetoric
Dept. of English
University of Illinois at Chicago