Ethics or regulation?

In this section of their guide to research ethics Mark Israel and Iain Hay (Flinders University, Australia) examine the tensions between ethical conduct and research ethics governance, looking at definitions of ethics and its regulation at national and international levels. (See the resource guide for a full list of the guidelines and codes of practice referred to.)

Empirical researchers face two distinct difficulties – we not only have to develop ways of working that can be regarded as ethical, but also have to meet the demands of regulators of research ethics without compromising ethical conduct.

These are not always the same thing. At best, research ethics committees and frameworks help researchers respond to ethical issues. Sadly, however, there is a considerable international literature (Bosk & De Vries, 2004; Israel, 2004b; Lewis et al, 2003; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Ethics Special Working Committee, 2004) that reveals how ethical research can be compromised by bureaucratic procedural demands, particularly when “researchers see ethics as a combination of research hurdle, standard exercise, bureaucratic game and meaningless artefact” (Holbrook, 1997, p59).

The two requirements operate simultaneously – our need to behave ethically and to satisfy regulatory requirements operates through the entire research process. Scholars might be tempted to see research ethics approval as a gate to be passed through, but most committees intend their decisions to have an impact on what follows and would imagine that their work shapes what occurs before the formal review process.

In Israel & Hay (2006) we suggested that newer researchers might be inclined to approach projects by identifying both the key intellectual debates they wish to consider and the means by which they expect to investigate them. This might involve, at best, some broad and tentative explorations of the ethical implications of choosing particular methodologies, but little in the way of rigorous contemplation. This should not come as much of a surprise, given the training that lawyers and social scientists have provided and received. Legal academics rarely receive formal training in empirical research (Genn et al, 2006). Most guides for social scientists to (and, we suspect, courses on) research – if they discuss ethics at all – do so as a separate chapter. Ethics are rarely integrated into the material as a whole.

Typically then, it is not until new researchers are compelled to respond to research ethics committee requirements that they give detailed consideration to ethical issues. It is at this point that investigators with little experience may confront serious difficulties. For instance, the biomedically derived, hard architecture of some ethics forms can lead social scientists to adopt particular kinds of responses to committee demands because they cannot conceive or justify any alternative.

In short, for a junior researcher, the formal process of ethics review offers both disadvantages and advantages – it can unreasonably restrict ethical responses but it can also offer a significant mechanism for stimulating ethical reflection. Sadly, having received the formal stamp of regulatory approval, some researchers appear to believe that the time for ethical reflection is over. However, no matter how well prepared they are, no matter how thoroughly they have prepared their research project, and no matter how properly they behave, researchers are likely to have to deal with a variety of unanticipated ethical dilemmas and problems once their study commences. Ethical consideration is never a ‘done deal’.

More experienced researchers can draw on their knowledge of how they and their colleagues have developed research plans, interpreted ethical guidelines, engaged with research ethics committees, and managed the practicalities of negotiating ethics in the field. From the outset of their research, they can anticipate many of the problems they are likely to encounter in their research as well as the issues they may face having their proposed work accepted by a research ethics committee. By comparison with more junior colleagues, they may have broader scholarly networks to draw on for advice and greater negotiating power with regulators, though some very senior social scientists have expressed on record their frustration with review processes (Israel, 2004b; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Ethics Special Working Committee, 2004). More experienced researchers know that ethics needs to be designed into a project from the outset – it is “what happens in every interaction” (Komesaroff in Guillemin & Gillam, 2004 p266), and continues well after the research is concluded.

What is ethics?

Ethical behaviour helps protect individuals, communities and environments, and offers the potential to increase the sum of good in the world. Ethical research conduct assures trust and helps protect the rights of individuals and communities involved in our investigations. It ensures research integrity, and, in the face of growing evidence of academic, scientific and professional corruption, misconduct and impropriety, there are now emerging public and institutional demands for individual and collective professional accountability.

Ethics, in the words of Beauchamp and Childress (1994, p4) is “a generic term for various ways of understanding and examining the moral life”. It is concerned with perspectives on right and proper conduct. One branch of ethical philosophy, normative ethics, offers the moral norms which guide, or indicate what one should do or not do, in particular situations. While this ethics literature can be quite daunting to most non-philosophers – and that includes us as writers on research ethics – in summary, there are two major ways of assessing whether people’s actions and decisions are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘bad’ or ‘good’:

• teleological approaches see the judgement of acts as ethical or not on the basis of the consequences of those acts
• deontological approaches suggest that our evaluation of moral behaviour requires consideration of matters other than the ends produced by people’s actions and behaviours

We don’t want to oversimplify ethics. There are other alternative and derivative approaches, including casuistry and virtue ethics, which we won’t discuss here. And, in the past two decades especially, there has been growing interest in ‘ethics of care’ as an alternative or, as is more commonly argued, a complement to traditional ‘ethics of justice’ (Gilligan, 1977). We shall return to the ‘ethics of care’ later when we look at the responsibilities that researchers might have to individuals, groups and organisations who are not actually participants in the research.

Tackling the same problem from different normative approaches

Consider the case of two prison researchers, both of whom promised their subjects complete confidentiality in exchange for candid information. In each case, the information is ‘dirty’ in that revelation could put the subjects at legal or other risk. Both researchers elicited from prison staff detailed information describing mistreatment of prisoners. In both cases, the researchers were subpoenaed to testify against their research subjects in civil suits against prison staff. One researcher broke his vow of confidentiality and testified, with unpleasant consequences for subjects. The other did not.

Both appealed to the ‘rules’ of an ethical theory to justify their actions. The researcher who testified adhered to an act-deontological position in which the particular circumstances, abuse of authority and corresponding subversion of justice by those sworn to uphold it, compelled him in this situation to break his promise in order to fulfil a higher principle. The researcher who remained silent adhered to a rule-deontological position – he made a promise that he was duty bound to keep, regardless of the consequences. Both decisions proceeded from strong ethical principles, and neither researcher could be faulted for his respective decision.

Consider again the researcher who broke his vow of confidentiality to testify against his informants. If, instead of appealing to a transcendent rule, he had argued that his testimony was necessary to end abuse of prisoners by staff and thereby promote justice as a social good, he could make his case from an act-utilitarian position. By contrast, a rule-utilitarian approach is not uncommon amongst journalists who argue that invasions of personal privacy are outweighed by the public’s ‘right to know,’ or amongst researchers who intentionally lie to gain access to ‘deviant’ research settings on the grounds that it is the only way to obtain information on an intellectually important topic.
(Source: Thomas, 1996)

How is ethics regulated?

National regulation

Until recently British social scientists were enmeshed in a tangled web of professional codes and patchy institutional requirements. Moreover, those research ethics governance frameworks that did exist were not designed to meet their needs, having been dominated since the 1960s by biomedical interests (Lewis et al, 2003).

One strand of research ethics governance was provided by professional associations such as the Social Research Association, the Socio-Legal Studies Association, the British Sociological Association, the British Psychological Society, the British Educational Research Association and the British Society of Criminology, all of which developed their own ethical guidelines or regulatory codes of conduct (see the resource guide for links).

In another strand, many British universities established codes of practice, set up ethics committees, or offered ethical guidance. There was – and remains – considerable variety. Some universities established research ethics committees, although a survey conducted in late 2003 suggested that perhaps only about 80 per cent had done so (Tinker & Coomber, 2004). Some universities had a single university research ethics committee (UREC), covering the whole of the institution. Others had committees at both university and school or departmental level. In some cases, universities had no institutional level committee, and the role of the research ethics committee (REC) was restricted to particular disciplines such as psychology or medicine.

In 2005 the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) released its Research Ethics Framework in response to the challenge presented by a lack of national co-ordination for social science research ethics, the needs of researchers, and the possibility that inappropriate bioethical regulations would be imposed across the research spectrum. The framework can be seen as part of a wider process of formalisation of research governance (Boon, 2005). The framework sets out the ESRC’s expectations for research work it is asked to fund and what it sees as “good practice for all social science research”.

British regulation has been shaped by international trends in bioethics – the Nuremberg Code (1947), the Declaration of Helsinki (1964) and the CIOMS guidelines (1982). These statements on biomedical research provide key foundations for much current thinking and practice in social science research – either intellectually or institutionally through the dominance of the biomedical research model in the shaping of institutional ethical practice.

There is also a clear correspondence between the ESRC framework principles and other national approaches (for example, the American Belmont Principles, the Australian National Statement and the Canadian Tri-Council Policy Statement). However, rather than disregarding existing professional and disciplinary standards when establishing a national approach to the regulation of social science research ethics – which appears to have been the pattern in Australia and Canada – the ESRC framework offers researchers the opportunity to draw from those standards to decide upon, and justify explicitly, the ethical sensitivity of their project, and consequently the extent of institutional review the project receives.

Review under the ESRC framework may be either a so-called ‘light-touch’ evaluation by a subcommittee of an institution’s REC, or a full REC review. RECs are expected to comprise about seven members and should be multidisciplinary, comprising men and women, relevant research experts and lay representatives. They are required to be unbiased and independent. The ESRC framework also makes clear the burdens of responsibility and consequences of failing to conduct ethical research properly.

The ESRC framework has avoided many of the traps that have bedevilled North American and Australian regulations. For example, under the framework arrangements can be made to allow ethical review after funding has been released. Committees will have to have the methodological and area-specific expertise necessary to review proposals that come before them and should be sensitive to the context within which research is being conducted. So, the ESRC framework recognises that there may be occasions when signed consent forms or parental consent are unnecessary, or when covert research or research that harms the interests of the research subjects is appropriate. In contrast, criminologists in both North America and Australasia have had long running disputes with research ethics committees over the wisdom of requiring parental consent or signed consent forms for research with illicit drug users or gang members, or of revealing to survey recipients that the researchers are examining levels of racism.

On the other hand, we can still expect arguments over some key matters – what is or is not research, what levels of confidentiality might be offered to participants, and what constitutes minimal risk for the purposes of expedited review. It remains unclear how research will be monitored after the initial review, how quickly postgraduate projects can be reviewed, and how multiple committees will review projects.

Adoption of the ESRC framework marks a significant change in the British approach to governance of social science research ethics. It endeavours to:

• preserve researchers’ disciplinary affiliations
• emphasise their ethical reflexivity and responsibilities
• provide a thoughtful, consistent structure for social science ethics scrutiny

International regulation

Responsibility for the regulation of British researchers is not limited to British regulatory authorities. First, British researchers may be subject to other national standards if they are undertaking research or obtaining funds outside the UK. Second, as European integration has proceeded the European Commission has argued for greater consistency in regulatory approaches to research ethics, exemplified by the establishment of a European Network of Research Ethics Committees (EUREC). EUREC facilitates knowledge exchange, conducts ethics related research, disseminates ethics teaching materials among its members and is involved in discussions with the European Commission about the local implementation of directives.

For social scientists, one of the most interesting supranational developments is the European funded RESPECT project, part of the Commission’s Information Society Technologies Programme. The objective of RESPECT was to create a set of ethical and professional guidelines to serve as a voluntary code for socio-economic research across Europe, to function as an aid to decision making rather than a prescriptive code. The guidelines – intended to blend the contents of existing codes, together with current European Union legal requirements – were to be founded on three principles – upholding scientific standards, compliance with the law and avoidance of social and personal harm.

The RESPECT code was not created to replace existing and emerging professional ethical codes but rather to serve as a source that might help improve existing codes, or as an aid to organisations developing new codes. Perhaps most interesting, however, is the intention that the code support the development of a common, international research environment with “transparent and universally agreed” standards. Whether the RESPECT code will achieve this end is yet to be seen. For the time being there exists an uneven range of separate and distinct nation based approaches to research ethics governance in Europe – initiatives such as the ESRC’s framework appear to be uninformed by European developments.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010