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The Walden IRB application checklist: every document the board reads as one file

There is no universal Walden IRB packet — and that is the first thing to understand about building one. Your Form A answers generate a study-specific document list, emailed back by the IRB office, and the file you eventually submit is judged as a single argument: every enclosure agreeing with the approved proposal and with every other enclosure. What follows is the inventory that list draws from, item by item, with the job each document is hired to do.

Lauren Petrakis, MSN, RN · 2026-08-23

In a line — the Walden file is built from Form A's tailored reply: current CITI certification, consent on Walden's template, every recruitment piece verbatim, site cooperation and data-use documentation, instruments as they will be used, and the data plan — one version, no contradictions, nothing left implied.

Why is there no single official packet?

Because Walden routes by data source, not by program. The published process is explicit: you complete Form A — the Description of Data Sources and Partner Sites — and a Research Ethics Support Specialist emails back the list of documents and partner-organization paperwork your particular study requires. A records-based project at one hospital and an interview study across three school districts receive different lists from the same office. The checklist below is the superset we see those lists drawn from; your reply from the IRB office, and Walden's current handbook or portal, decide which items your file actually carries.

The inventory, item by item

  1. Form A itself. The opening move, filed once the chair confirms the committee's methodology feedback is addressed. Its answers must describe the design your committee is actually approving — Walden warns that forms drafted against an unsettled methodology sprout stray references the board later queries.
  2. CITI human-subjects certification, current, under your Walden registration. Walden holds a subscription covering its researchers and recommends its non-expiring human-subjects protection module; other training certificates can be accepted, but the safe play is the module the university names, completed under the same identity your application carries.
  3. The consent document, built on Walden's template. Walden publishes a consent form template for adult participants, a parental consent template, and an assent template for minors. The federal spine underneath them is 45 CFR 46.116: the research purpose, the procedures, foreseeable risks, expected benefits, confidentiality limits, the statement that participation is voluntary and may be discontinued without penalty, and whom to contact. Anonymous designs may consent differently — an implied-consent survey opening, for instance — but the elements still have to be present in what participants read.
  4. Recruitment materials, verbatim. Walden supplies invitation templates for email, print and social media for a reason: the board reads the exact words a prospective participant will see, not a paraphrase of them. Every flyer, script, post and forwarded email goes in as its own artifact, typo-free — Walden's own delay FAQ tells applicants to have someone unfamiliar with the study proofread the invitation and consent for exactly this reason.
  5. Partner-organization documentation. Depending on the design: a letter of cooperation describing, in the site's own voice, the recruitment, data collection and dissemination activities it is hosting, the personnel and resources involved, and — for any intervention — the site's role in sponsoring and supervising it within standard operations; or a data use agreement, signed by the organization's gatekeeper, releasing de-identified records for the study. Walden recommends the IRB see these in draft during the preliminary window and advises against collecting signatures before procedures are final; not every study needs one, and the IRB's Form A reply says whether yours does.
  6. Instruments and guides, in the version that will touch a participant. Surveys, interview guides, focus-group prompts, observation protocols — each aligned with the proposal the committee and University Research Reviewer approved, plus permission documentation where a published instrument's terms require it.
  7. The data plan: collection, storage, retention, destruction. Walden expects a recruitment and data collection log — it publishes sample logs — and the handbook sets retention at five years beyond the final approval of the manuscript, in a confidential and secure form, with raw data electronically available to the committee. Anyone else touching identifiable data has paperwork of their own: a committee-approved transcriber signs a confidentiality agreement before hearing a word.
  8. The ethics self-check. For studies collecting new data, Walden's Research Ethics Approval Checklist mirrors the self-check the process will ask you to complete — running it against your own file before submission is the cheapest review you will ever get.

Which documents continue past approval?

Two forms exist so that the approved file can keep matching reality. The Request for a Change in Procedures is how any post-approval adjustment — a site, an instrument, a recruitment channel — gets approved before it is used; the adverse event report is how the unexpected reaches the board. Both matter because of the rule that organizes everything: the board approved a specific list of procedures, and work outside that list can see the data invalidated and the manuscript rejected. An approved file is not a finished correspondence — it is a current one.

What never appears in the final manuscript?

Almost all of it — deliberately. Walden's Form and Style guidance is unambiguous: the IRB application, the board's emails, signed consent forms, letters of cooperation, data use agreements and transcriber confidentiality agreements are internal documents containing identifying information, and none of them is included as an appendix. Partner organizations are masked in the manuscript as a matter of standard practice — a pseudonym or general description, with any exception requiring the program director's and the IRB's blessing — and site descriptions are kept general enough that no participant could be triangulated from them. What does appear is one line: the IRB approval number, placed in the narrative — usually the methodology's participant-protection passage — in the parenthetical form the editors give: (Walden IRB approval no. xxxxxx).

How do the versions have to agree?

Completely, because the board reads the file sideways as well as top to bottom. The interview length promised in the consent form is checked against the interview guide; the anonymity claimed in the application is checked against a survey platform that could log identities; the activities the cooperation letter grants are checked against the recruitment materials that will actually run; and all of it is checked against the proposal recorded in MyDR at approval. Walden's close-the-loop step exists precisely because defenses change details — the file the board officially reviews must be the file the defense produced, not the one you drafted a season earlier. When we assemble a submission, the version pass is the longest single step: one file, one design, every claim matching every other, so the board's first reading finds nothing to send back.

What to do next

If your Form A reply is sitting in your inbox — or your documents exist but no two of them quite agree — bring the pile to the contact page and ask for the free review. We read it as the board will: item against item, file against proposal, and tell you in writing what is complete, what conflicts and what is missing. From there the desk takes the entire process end to end — every document above, the submission itself, and each reply to the board until the approval email lands with its number — while the study stays yours and the decision stays the board's. Where the file sits in the larger sequence is drawn in Walden IRB approval, step by step; why so much of it can be built before proposal approval is the subject of what the URR locks before the board reads it; and the desk's three moves are on how it works.

Sources

The reply envelope

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the practice
consultants to Walden doctoral candidates
at the ethics step

To: the candidate whose proposal is signed, whose reviewer has concurred — and whose application hasn't gone in yet.

Request the free application review

We read what you have as the board will and tell you where it stands — including, when it is true, “file it as it stands.” Then we carry the whole process: every document, the submission, every reply, until the approval letter. No cost to begin, no obligation.

Fiona Castellan, DNP, APRN Senior IRB consultant online