The Ethics of Research Ethics
Stanley L Witkin Professor
Department of Social Work University of Vermont Burlington Vermont USA
Historical Background
• Nuremberg 1947
• Declaration of Helsinki 1964
• Belmont Principles 1978 Redressing wrongs
Bioethics Utilitarian
A Question and a Premise
• To what extent do research ethics as
commonly understood and implemented adequately address ethical issues?
• Different conceptions of research and its aims lead to different understandings of ethics and its relationship to research
Basic Principles
• Respect for persons –informed consent
• Beneficence - risks & benefits
• Justice –fairness in selection of subjects
Assumes Conventional Research Model
• Research a method-based, value-free activity
• Systematic Investigation: Employs a
formal protocol designed to reach a priori objective(s) (hypothesis)
• Objective and generalizable knowledge
• Aims: prediction & control
• Utilitarian ethic –greatest good for the greatest number –codified in procedures and rules
assumed to be universally applicable.
• Potential benefits of research to society
compared to potential risks to participants.
• Research itself assumed to be ethical.
Regulations designed to discourage, control and sanction improper behavior of researchers.
Weighing Benefits & Risks
“Applied to ethics-in-science decision making, when a conflict between scientific rigor and
participant welfare arises, the investigator’s
obligation to a small group of research participants may be superseded by her or his responsibility to produce reliable data that can potentially provide future benefits to members of society at large or to the participants’particular social group.”
(Lincoln & Tierney, 2004) (327)
Weighing Benefits & Risks
• Deception
• Altruism and the Bystander Effect
• De-briefing
• Adding rule-based ethics –What are the duties and obligations of researchers
toward subjects?
Alternative Inquiry
• Builds on the postmodern critique of grand narratives, universality and objective
knowledge
• Research a discursive, value-laden, co- constructed activity
• Emergent process
• Contextual knowledge
Different meaning of research and its aims Alternative forms of inquiry did not adopt the
template of experimentation.
Different views of e.g., subject/participants, protocols, and representation.
New forms of inquiry, e.g., PAR, performative ethnographies
Leads to an postmodern ethic that “moves away from the idea of universal standards to which we all should adhere or to principles which all should assiduously apply. “To search for such a set of standards or principles presumes that there are right answers to moral questions which all
reasonable persons are obliged to accept”
(Madison & Fairbairn, 1999: 123).
Entire research enterprise, not only actions of researchers, seen as an ethical exercise:
“every research activity is an exercise in research ethics, every research question is a moral
dilemma, and every research decision is an
instantiation of values. In short, postmodernism does not permit the distinction between research methods and research ethics”
(Clegg & Slife, 2009).
Research and ethics inextricably intertwined.
Viewed as contextual, discursive, ongoing, emergent.
• Work we do, whether research or practice, is inherently political. It will benefit some and disadvantage others. It will express certain values and minimize others.
Social Work Perspective
•Social work researchers stand deep in the water in terms of ethical concerns because of the nature of the populations with whom they typically work, the sensitive nature of the issues they address, the inherent need in their profession to be closely involved
with their clients, the social justice issues they encounter, and their desire to see
social transformation (Merten & Ginsberg, 2008, 485).
• Activist researchers –aim is not
generalizable knowledge nor limited to understanding, but like social work
practice, seeks to bring about social
change. Such research (and practice) is contextual, that is, problems are explored in relation to broader social forces that are believed to generate and sustain them.
Interpreting Ethics
• Ethics Committees and IRBs
Interpretation of ethical standards monitoring behavior of researchers enforcement of sanctions
Illusory Ethics?
Assumption that one model of research is appropriate for all forms of inquiry. Also, “presumes a static.
monolithic view of the human subject, that is,
someone upon whom research is done.”Many forms of research such as performance-based inquiry and participatory action research, fall outside this model.
(Denzin, 2008.)
Creates the illusion that ethical concerns have been
addressed; however primary concern with protecting institution against loss of funding and lawsuits.
(Lincoln & Tierney, 2004, 327, emphasis added).
• Extended reach of ethics committees in recent years has created difficulties for researchers who wish to use alternative forms of inquiry. E.g., methodological
soundness
Research Subjects:
Who is Included and Excluded?
Jill Fisher (2007) Human subjects industry (USA)
“ready to recruit”populations for clinical trials targeted by pharmaceutical industry
• Recruit subjects through advertisements.
• Phase 1 clinical trials –determine safety (toxicity) of drugs and to establish appropriate dosage levels).
“overwhelmingly filled by low-income, minority men who participate in clinical trials in exchange for money.”
• Phases II and III –test for efficacy –enrollment tends to be individuals without health insurance, particularly white women.
Meaning of Informed Consent?
• Clinical trials have become way for people to gain income and access to health care.
• Decision to participate prior to consent
• Consent models do not account for
imbalances of power –focus on how they participate and not why
• Need change in structural conditions.
Excluded
Women
Norms about "ideal" research
Compliance in adhering to research regimens
Norms that value homogeneity among research subjects
Eckenwiler, Feinhols, Ells, & Schonfeld (2008).
Culture, Community
Myth of Neutrality
• Questions researchers ask (and not ask), e.g., those that focus on peoples’inadequacies, may ignore conditions or reproduce narratives about them that contribute to the problem (seeing them as acontextual or apolitical). Similarly with
methodology, e.g. traditional ethnography that portrays people from researcher’s perspective, that does not include them in their own
representation. Neither questions nor methodology are neutral.
Problem Framing
• “problem framing as a key site of ethical decision making.”
• “often implicit assumptions about what counts as a good topic and how to frame one as a researchable problem”(1004).
• Autonomy of researchers limited
• ethical question of “responsibility at a distance”“. . . how the processes researchers examine in the lives of the people and events they encounter directly are also constitutive of lives and events elsewhere (998).
Jan Nespor and Susan L. Groenke. 2009. Ethics, Problem Framing, and Training in Qualitative Inquiry Qualitative Inquiry, 15; 996-1012.
• Sensitizes us to issues of community, in particular, communities representing
marginalized, colonized, or indigenous people.
• Increasingly people in these groups have questioned the impact of research on their well-being.
• “. . . one of the key instigators of our marginalization has been research in
which we have been seen as “other”in our own land”(p. 2)
• “… they are finding out about us but this
knowing does not challenge the status quo that maintains our marginalization” (2)
ionaCram, with Adreanne Ormond & Lyn Carter 2004.
Charles Weijer (2010) proposes that respect for
communities requires that researchers take seriously the values and choices of the community and protect it from harm.
Calls for a community-researcher partnership with:
• Respect for community values and priorities
• Community consultation and consent
• Community involvement in the conduct of the research
• Negotiation regarding fate of data and samples
• Plan for disseminating research findings
Necessity of dialogue
• Dialogue only possible if researchers enter
these situations as learners, respectful of others ways of knowing and their right to determine
“what is real and what is valuable”(Castellano, 2004, 102).
• “A relationship ethic also encompasses notions of researchers and participants journeying
together, learning from one another in the context of participant control and researcher accountability”(ionaCram, 2004, 9).
Need to engage in examination of our own value positions and beliefs about knowledge production. Some examples include:
“first principle in devising an ethics regime for Aboriginal research.”Aboriginal Peoples have an inherent right to participate as principals or partners in research that
generates knowledge affecting their culture, identity and well-being (Castellano, 2004,108).
ways that the intrinsic focus on language through
research privileges particular ways of being in the world (Lincoln & Cannella. 2009)
Issues of interpretation and representation of others
Ownership of the data and outcomes of the research.
If and how we make transparent the decision-making processes between
researcher and participant (Etherington, 2007).
How are forms of exclusion being produced?
How does the practice of research reinscribe our own privilege?
“How do we work with people who are not academically trained to insure that any
research we conduct on their behalf is in collaboration with them?”
(Cannella & Lincoln, 2007, 321).
Conclusion
• The challenge for social work researchers is to explore ways in which we can
integrate the values and aims of our
profession into our research practices.
Doing so requires that we go beyond
current conceptions of research ethics and the research models on which they are
based and work collaboratively with those we would we would aim to serve.
