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Doing Ethical Research
Navigating ethical issues throughout your research project can be a confusing and daunting task. But why are ethics so important anyway? Can you anticipate or prepare for ethical dilemmas before they happen? And what can you do if they arise in your research?
Doing Ethical Research offers essential advice on how to negotiate ethical considerations at each stage of your project, from the approval application to the final report write-up. In particular, the
- Examines the fundamental importance of ethical research and assessment
- Explores hot topics of consent, confidentiality and research relationships
- Includes ethical dilemmas and case studies to show how ethics affect real-life research
- Gives readers confidence to interpret and critically reflect upon ethical debates
Each chapter is packed with clear examples and explanations that are designed to help readers to make their own ethical decisions. It is an essential resource for all researchers, whatever their level or research background.
Doing Ethical Research offers essential advice on how to negotiate ethical considerations at each stage of your project, from the approval application to the final report write-up. In particular, the
- Examines the fundamental importance of ethical research and assessment
- Explores hot topics of consent, confidentiality and research relationships
- Includes ethical dilemmas and case studies to show how ethics affect real-life research
- Gives readers confidence to interpret and critically reflect upon ethical debates
Each chapter is packed with clear examples and explanations that are designed to help readers to make their own ethical decisions. It is an essential resource for all researchers, whatever their level or research background.
224 pages, Paperback
First published December 24, 2012
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March 29, 2013
This book comes as a breath of fresh air in the midst of a fairly abstract and at times turgid ‘debate’; not only do I welcome it but I have been singing its praises and insisting on its use around my academic community.
The biggest change in social research in the last 30 years or so has been the rise of research ethics. When I started out doing graduate student work in the mid-1980s it was really only the medics who were concerned about research ethics, and then inconsistently. Although, it was medical research that gave us the first research ethics codes in response to the experiments in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War, and then in response to events such as the Tuskegee syphilis investigations in the USA. As a result, and to a very large degree, our research ethics practices and approaches are shaped by biomedical concerns that shape if not define our understandings of issues such as consent, harm and so forth. This biomedical frame is hard to shake, and in many aspects is not suited to approaches and disciplinary conventions and difference in social research.
The dominant biomedical approach is also part of an array of issues that drives some people away from good research projects. As chair of my University’s research ethics committee I am often alarmed at the way a combination of ethics hypersensitivity (I’d like to claim that term, but it is Martin Hammersley’s) and risk aversion as well as a perception of bureaucratic obstructiveness leads to researchers doing less interesting projects than they might really want to do, and more importantly when I hear staff members direct students to projects that will not require REC scrutiny. One of the reasons why projects require REC approval is that they are the most interesting because they are exploring the most challenging issues. The other deeply depressing aspect of many of my fellow staff members’ and students’ approaches to ethics is the view that it something that can be ticked off at the beginning as a procedural matter. Despite these worries, the research ethics committee is by far the most interesting one I chair and among the most interesting I sit on, because it is one of the few where we have deep, detailed and substantive debates about scholarly activity (and that, in itself, is a damning indictment of the impact of managerialism on higher education).
This extremely important book then is more than welcome for two principal reasons. The first is its approach: although there are plenty of discussions of research ethics in the research methods literature, for the most part they are chapters in other more general books and tend to say the same thing in slightly different ways, depending on the relevant disciplinary conventions, while often suggesting that ethics is a thing to think about after the (more) important work of developing a project – this is very often the final chapter in the book. The other approach in the literature is the philosophical discussion of ethics in research, which while important and useful in itself, is very often distant from the needs of researchers, both staff and students. This is very much a practitioner’s book, long on good advice about practical needs and likely scenarios.
The second reason is more manifold, and is about specific content. There are several things that Farrimond does extremely well. The first is to make clear that because no two cases are the same, researchers should never presume that identical approaches will work in each case or that an application using an approach that has been previously approved will be approved again; that is, there is and can be no formulaic approach. Research ethics decisions are always about weighing up different and often competing aspects of a particular research project.
This opens up the second strength of the book; detailed practical knowledge. This comes through, in part, discussions around research design, institutional variations and norms, and ways to write good ethics proposals. Then practical knowledge is explored through nuanced discussions of issue such as consent, harm, privacy, anonymity and confidentiality (aka, PAC), work with vulnerable groups and on sensitive topics, working with children and internet research. In these, Farrimond drills down into the variations, debates and limits of conventional approaches to demand that every researcher explore the specific issues in their own project.
The third strength is the one many researchers and often ethics committee members have most difficulty with, and has two aspects. The first is that the usual approach of the anticipatory review (something we have acquired from biomedicine) is limited in several ways in social research, most notably that we cannot anticipate all the issues or situations likely to arise in any project, so although we have scrutiny at the outset of any project, social research must adopt a lifecycle approach and be aware of the way ethical issues may emerge at different time and in different ways throughout any project, so there are ethical aspects to the choice of topic, research design, data collection, analysis and dissemination. This emphasis on a lifecycle approach is, for me, one of the most exciting parts of the text and one that makes it most useful for both beginning and more experienced researchers.
This lifecycle approach (a view I share) leads to the second aspect of this strength and means that one of the key judgments we make as part of an anticipatory review is the ‘ethical competence’ (Farrimond’s term, and one I really like) of the researcher. I can think of one particular project our committee reviewed that was extremely difficult – the research questions explored a morally and legally fraught area with a population that is extremely vulnerable to both harm and exploitation, and was venturing into an area where my institution had not done much work in the past, so the security that comes from knowing there is depth of experience in the field to help with any unanticipated issues was not there. We usually like to meet proposers to discuss projects; in this case we insisted: within a few sentences of the discussion opening I was convinced of the ethical competence of the team in this specific project and what we had been concerned might be a very difficult review became quite straightforward. Judgements of ethical competence are the most important things we do, cause committee members the most distress as we can be seen to pass implicit judgement on our colleagues and co-workers and the most risky – which is what makes the work of the committee so challenging.
Fourth, a recurring aspect of the book I find extremely useful is Farrimond’s emphasis on academic freedom as a principle in ethics decisions. She deals, as expected, with the four core principles – respect, beneficence, non-malfeasance and justice – and adds the now conventional principle of fidelity (that is, researcher trustworthiness, honesty and so forth). She then goes on to identify academic freedom as the sixth principle; the notion that researchers should be able to design and conduct research free from interference by, say commercially interested companies, funding bodies or university managers. This is the first time I have seen this principle so forcefully argued in an exploration of research ethics, rather than other academic settings.
Finally, the book is sensitive to national variations, so there is useful and regular identification of differences in US and UK settings, with references also to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. She is also careful to identify the range of source of research ethics guidance – government, scholarly bodies, research funding bodies as the usual sources, but she also points to published codes dealing First Nations communities as well as highlighting the importance of local cultural and social norms.
This is an essential text for both new and experienced social researchers; I hope it sells by the thousands.
The biggest change in social research in the last 30 years or so has been the rise of research ethics. When I started out doing graduate student work in the mid-1980s it was really only the medics who were concerned about research ethics, and then inconsistently. Although, it was medical research that gave us the first research ethics codes in response to the experiments in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War, and then in response to events such as the Tuskegee syphilis investigations in the USA. As a result, and to a very large degree, our research ethics practices and approaches are shaped by biomedical concerns that shape if not define our understandings of issues such as consent, harm and so forth. This biomedical frame is hard to shake, and in many aspects is not suited to approaches and disciplinary conventions and difference in social research.
The dominant biomedical approach is also part of an array of issues that drives some people away from good research projects. As chair of my University’s research ethics committee I am often alarmed at the way a combination of ethics hypersensitivity (I’d like to claim that term, but it is Martin Hammersley’s) and risk aversion as well as a perception of bureaucratic obstructiveness leads to researchers doing less interesting projects than they might really want to do, and more importantly when I hear staff members direct students to projects that will not require REC scrutiny. One of the reasons why projects require REC approval is that they are the most interesting because they are exploring the most challenging issues. The other deeply depressing aspect of many of my fellow staff members’ and students’ approaches to ethics is the view that it something that can be ticked off at the beginning as a procedural matter. Despite these worries, the research ethics committee is by far the most interesting one I chair and among the most interesting I sit on, because it is one of the few where we have deep, detailed and substantive debates about scholarly activity (and that, in itself, is a damning indictment of the impact of managerialism on higher education).
This extremely important book then is more than welcome for two principal reasons. The first is its approach: although there are plenty of discussions of research ethics in the research methods literature, for the most part they are chapters in other more general books and tend to say the same thing in slightly different ways, depending on the relevant disciplinary conventions, while often suggesting that ethics is a thing to think about after the (more) important work of developing a project – this is very often the final chapter in the book. The other approach in the literature is the philosophical discussion of ethics in research, which while important and useful in itself, is very often distant from the needs of researchers, both staff and students. This is very much a practitioner’s book, long on good advice about practical needs and likely scenarios.
The second reason is more manifold, and is about specific content. There are several things that Farrimond does extremely well. The first is to make clear that because no two cases are the same, researchers should never presume that identical approaches will work in each case or that an application using an approach that has been previously approved will be approved again; that is, there is and can be no formulaic approach. Research ethics decisions are always about weighing up different and often competing aspects of a particular research project.
This opens up the second strength of the book; detailed practical knowledge. This comes through, in part, discussions around research design, institutional variations and norms, and ways to write good ethics proposals. Then practical knowledge is explored through nuanced discussions of issue such as consent, harm, privacy, anonymity and confidentiality (aka, PAC), work with vulnerable groups and on sensitive topics, working with children and internet research. In these, Farrimond drills down into the variations, debates and limits of conventional approaches to demand that every researcher explore the specific issues in their own project.
The third strength is the one many researchers and often ethics committee members have most difficulty with, and has two aspects. The first is that the usual approach of the anticipatory review (something we have acquired from biomedicine) is limited in several ways in social research, most notably that we cannot anticipate all the issues or situations likely to arise in any project, so although we have scrutiny at the outset of any project, social research must adopt a lifecycle approach and be aware of the way ethical issues may emerge at different time and in different ways throughout any project, so there are ethical aspects to the choice of topic, research design, data collection, analysis and dissemination. This emphasis on a lifecycle approach is, for me, one of the most exciting parts of the text and one that makes it most useful for both beginning and more experienced researchers.
This lifecycle approach (a view I share) leads to the second aspect of this strength and means that one of the key judgments we make as part of an anticipatory review is the ‘ethical competence’ (Farrimond’s term, and one I really like) of the researcher. I can think of one particular project our committee reviewed that was extremely difficult – the research questions explored a morally and legally fraught area with a population that is extremely vulnerable to both harm and exploitation, and was venturing into an area where my institution had not done much work in the past, so the security that comes from knowing there is depth of experience in the field to help with any unanticipated issues was not there. We usually like to meet proposers to discuss projects; in this case we insisted: within a few sentences of the discussion opening I was convinced of the ethical competence of the team in this specific project and what we had been concerned might be a very difficult review became quite straightforward. Judgements of ethical competence are the most important things we do, cause committee members the most distress as we can be seen to pass implicit judgement on our colleagues and co-workers and the most risky – which is what makes the work of the committee so challenging.
Fourth, a recurring aspect of the book I find extremely useful is Farrimond’s emphasis on academic freedom as a principle in ethics decisions. She deals, as expected, with the four core principles – respect, beneficence, non-malfeasance and justice – and adds the now conventional principle of fidelity (that is, researcher trustworthiness, honesty and so forth). She then goes on to identify academic freedom as the sixth principle; the notion that researchers should be able to design and conduct research free from interference by, say commercially interested companies, funding bodies or university managers. This is the first time I have seen this principle so forcefully argued in an exploration of research ethics, rather than other academic settings.
Finally, the book is sensitive to national variations, so there is useful and regular identification of differences in US and UK settings, with references also to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. She is also careful to identify the range of source of research ethics guidance – government, scholarly bodies, research funding bodies as the usual sources, but she also points to published codes dealing First Nations communities as well as highlighting the importance of local cultural and social norms.
This is an essential text for both new and experienced social researchers; I hope it sells by the thousands.
Displaying 1 of 1 review