Research Ethics

A working party of academics from both professional safeguarding backgrounds and research backgrounds developed and wrote ethical guidelines on safeguarding children in research on behalf of their faculty research ethics committee. The working party encountered a lack of useful precedents while developing the guidelines leading to a lengthy process of debate and consideration of the issues. This paper explores the various issues and dilemmas arising during this process, particularly the tension between safeguarding children from abuse and maintaining research confidentiality. One of the main areas of discussion was how to establish the limits of confidentiality without compromising the research in hand.

The role and responsibilities of researchers in supporting children's welfare, and the development of procedures for ensuring that safeguarding is effective are discussed as key elements. In addition, the issues researchers may face when determining thresholds for intervention are considered alongside the uncertainties created by considerations of the extent to which children can give informed consent in research contexts.

The paper reflects the process of considering these issues and the conclusions the working party drew as to how best to support children's welfare during research. It also outlines the key elements of the guidelines and the structures developed to ensure researchers could get advice if suspected child abuse became an issue in their research.

The paper includes a short version of the guidelines which were eventually approved across the Higher Education Institute.

We aim, in this paper, to discuss how far the ethical framework for assessing medical research, generalized into other institutional settings, is also appropriate for social science research, particularly qualitative research. Recently, researchers have raised concerns about ‘ethics creep’, incompatibility with participatory methodologies and the exclusion of service users. Researchers are increasingly raising questions as to whether the processes of governance and the paradigmatic assumptions pervading research ethics committees are fit for purpose when they deliberate on non-clinical research that uses social science methods. We review whether ethical scrutiny by research ethics committees is asking the wrong questions and holding research to the wrong standards.

This paper describes the establishment of a research ethics committee in a business school within a university in Ireland. Many of the procedural issues encountered by the Kemmy Business School REC with respect to its modus operandi are outlined. The difficulties faced by business school RECs arising from the need to simultaneously accommodate both academic and corporate stakeholders are discussed in the context of the ethicality of research carried out in the business domain. The experiences of the authors, both of whom have served as respective chairpersons of the Kemmy Business School REC since its inception, inform the discussion. Given the dearth in the literature on research ethics in a business school context, the objective of this paper is to outline the experiences of one business school REC with respect to how it operates in order to assist other committees through the establishment phase and beyond.

People engaged in international research projects – whether sponsors, researchers or participants – have different cultural and religious backgrounds. This can lead to quandaries over whose values should dictate the ethical basis for research.

This paper addresses this issue by claiming that four core values are integral to the nature and justification of valid research and that to have integrity researchers must be committed to these values. Since the values are not specific to any particular culture or religion they constitute a neutral ethical framework for the conduct of international research.

It then claims that if researchers understand these values they can take responsibility for applying them to their own situation. This can help overcome problems which currently arise when researchers are not certain what to do because the specific ethical requirements of sponsors would be impractical or damaging if implemented in the circumstances in which the researchers operate.

Finally, it is suggested that the four values outlined in the paper may be a basis for further work – such as developing awareness training and evolving guidance for specialist areas of research.

Prior to any research data collection a proposal outlining methods and protocols is required to undergo ethical scrutiny. The issues surrounding a research ethics review process within sport and exercise science departments are not dissimilar to other subject areas. In particular, the ethical review process may be unclear to the researcher and can either present a difficult and time-consuming challenge or be merely perceived as a tick-box exercise. The aim of this study was to explore and compare research ethics processes and decisions within sport and exercise science departments and institutions across the UK.

Participants were asked to provide decisions and justification of those decisions on ten typical sports and exercise science proposals. Results found that all respondents cited evidence of informed consent and subject information sheets, detailed methodology and data protection procedures as highly important across all scenarios. Additionally it was found that similar processes occur regarding research ethical scrutiny and similar decisions are made at the departmental level. However, confidence fluctuates for individuals when reviewing in non-specialist subject areas and qualitative data collected calls for more research ethics training.

Grounded theory has become an established approach in (applied) qualitative research. Researchers could have an on-going, relative freedom when using this research strategy but their creativity will have been limited by the number of participants and interviews, and by the methodology that they have declared in their research ethics committee application. Since no robust evidence exists about potential harm in qualitative research in general and grounded theory in particular, we should rethink whether a greater freedom might be allowed to researchers when using a grounded theory approach. It is concluded that a greater freedom should be allowed, but only to skilled researchers as those with less experience might use less rigid rules to cover their lack of skills and research experience, potentially burdening the study participants unnecessarily.

This is the fourth in a series of five papers on the role, remit and function of research ethics committees which are intended to provide for REC members a broad understanding of the most important issues in research ethics and governance. This paper explores the role of ethics committees in reviewing proposed conditions for recruiting human subjects and in checking the intended procedures for gaining consent. In so doing the paper will reiterate the conditions which are traditionally thought to make consent valid, identify a number of limitations to meeting these conditions, and show when consent, however broadly construed or indeterminately focused, may be unnecessary.