Hi my name is James Arvanitakis. I'm the Dean of the Graduate Research School here at
Western Sydney University.
Welcome to our videos on ethical research. In this Part 1 we look at
ethics as a process and some of the philosophical approaches you need to
take. My name is Dr Tinashe Dune and i'm a lecturer in interprofessional health
sciences and my research focuses on cultural diversity, marginalization and
sexual and reproductive health, so the intersections between all of those
things put together and how that influences health outcomes for people
across Australia and across the world.
So my research area is genetics and molecular biology and I do
both quantitative and qualitative research in studies of human disease.
My name is David Hornsby and i'm an Associate Professor in international
relations and the Assistant Dean of Humanities at Wits University in
Johannesburg, South Africa.
I'm a political scientist by training, I grew up in Canada and moved to South
Africa about seven years ago and have been working as an academic in
Johannesburg ever since. My areas of research focus largely on experts and
international governance but also South African foreign policy, Canadian foreign
policy in Africa and the scholarship of teaching and learning, so things like
large class teaching and the notion of citizenship in higher education.
My name is Hannah Dahlen and I'm Professor of Midwifery in the School
of Nursing and Midwifery at Western Sydney University and so my area of research is
very much around birth, around how can we make it safer for women and babies,
around how can we improve outcomes for women and babies and also very
interested in systems of care that women are you know experiencing in
hospitals, in birth centres, at home and looking at how we can make those systems
better.
Hi my name is James Arvanitakis, I'm a Professor and a member of the
Institute for Cultural and Society. My research area covers three broad areas
but they're all interlinked. One,
I look at citizenship and
the way that people actually feel about their citizenship, so I'm interested in the
culture of citizenship.
The second area i'm interested in is pedagogies and the way that people
learn, so I'm really passionate about education and there's a link between
education and citizenship which I sort of talk a lot about in my
research. And the third area is also looking at political theatre and this
links because often theatre and different forms of art are actually an expression for
citizens, a way for citizens to express themselves.
Ethics is really important both from the perspective of the participants you'll
have involved in your study and the journey they go on while they're in your
study and as a researcher it's a a good protection for our research to make sure
that before we even begin interacting with the public
we make sure we've got everything in place to do that journey with minimal
harm to them and to make sure that we can publish our results at the end of
the study.
most of my research requires ethics because i'm talking to people so my
research methods are phenomenological which means that I'm going out there and
actually talking to people understanding their experiences so almost every
research project that i have has to do with ethics and that involves having the
ethics to be able to interview them or to do focus groups or to give them
surveys so across all of the ways in which that I collect data whether it be
on sexual reproductive health experiences or whether it be on the
experience of being an LGBT person i still have to get ethics in order to be
able to go out into the community discuss things with people as well as to
use that feedback that I get
i think is factored in almost every research I've ever done
it's a fundamental and very important beginning process of any research
so when we're dealing with doing Mina researching to eat humans weather which
interviewing them
whether it's a randomized controlled trial way we're implementing an
intervention it's really really important that ethics is the first step
in that process before we do anything
so one of the projects that i've been working on is the genetic basis of
celiac disease collection of DNA from participants which does require ethics
and they need to understand what it is we will do with their sample once we've
collected and not just the sample but once we've done some analysis of that
sample what we do with the data that we've collected from that sample thinks
is actually played a really important part of my research I mean each of those
requires me to interact with people in their experiences and sometimes that
experiences are quite positive the night discussed with the experience and
education or citizens has been has had quite profound and positive impacts on
them but the same time I've also interviewed people spend time with
people
we're actually they've had quite negative experiences in the interactions
with around issues of citizenship or education and and so this is with expose
a really important part because sometimes those groups are quite
vulnerable and so it's important to kind of be prepared in doing those groups I
think that's the most important part of ethics
it's actually a powerful mechanism to ensure that you're prepared when
engaging with groups specifically vulnerable groups when I was analyzing
internet blogs and internet media outputs so with the blogs
I didn't have to get ethics because it's a publicly available content
however i had an ethical dilemma and my ethical dilemma was that I was people
who put those blogs up didn't expect it was going to end up in an effort in a
paper research paper
so in order to protect their identity and to protect some form of
confidentiality i removed any identifying parts of those blogs and I
didn't actually named them so that was an ethical dilemma even though I didn't
require ethics
so within genetics research at the moment there's huge discussions about
the ethics of the knowledge that we gain so we might uncover
information that's not the direct relevance to the project
so for example we might uncover that someone has a susceptibility to breast
cancer but that's not what we're researching
so when we planned our research we made sure that participants could opt in or
opt out of getting access to information that her potential relevance to their
future health
we haven't actually come across that situation in real in reality but it's
something we have planned for that what happens if we do uncover something that
we weren't particularly looking for and then we planned what we would do if that
were to arise and how we would handle that
yes i have encountered some dilemmas I mean it is most of the dilemmas have to
do with a look at it was saying I i discussed intersections in people's
lives so in a research project you might have FX to talk to people who are from a
particular population but it also happens that they you know fit the
criteria for another study and so then the question becomes well
can that student actually discussed that other study with them or how do you
manage kind of the sample in a sense
so I mean what you do with that is if you need to get an amendment or if you
need to contact the person again you do that but obviously you run the risk of
maybe losing the participant or the sample not being as robust as you might
want it to be
and obviously the timings for both people as well as the researchers to
manage that
yeah look of the gathered a number of ethical dilemmas one ethical dilemma
actually emerged when i was doing my out my PhD my doctorate and that have
happened because I was working with social movements different social
movements around the world and at one time I was working with the social
movement that was involved in a protest and and what ended up happening was
during the protest
RT gas was fired toward the protesters and I got caught in the middle of a bit
of a la
and it was a really important are there is a really important moment to sort of
capture and i was there at the time to figure out what as a one as a researcher
as an observer shooter be able to capture and at what point do i need to
withdraw and and not take part anymore in in this process so it was a really
really difficult decision at the mic and I had to make that on the run
it's also difficult to ask people to sign that ethical release form when
they're running away from t gas
so in that in that moment I decided that the most important thing was both the
safety of the people I was working with but also my own safety
so what does this have to do with with just withdraw from the process and walk
away and i feel that anything else would compromise people safety and and put in
put people at risk and so that was a way that I . with that
so the difference between getting ethics approval and being ethical actually
they're very different than all the same thing so ethics approval is a formal
process that you go through
we're a group of of academics and we'll look at the research and make sure that
this is not going to harm the participants being an ethical research
however means that you have an ongoing checking of yourself making sure that at
all times you're asking yourself
am I making sure that this person isn't disadvantage
am I making sure that I'm not causing harm a my abiding by what I've been
asked to abide by by the ethics committee because once you get the
sign-off
really you're on your own and you could veer off into unethical behaviour so the
ethics approval is the formal part but the ethical behavior is the
accountability that the research and must put on themselves
I don't think there's a huge difference between them but what they represent
here are different elements right so ethics approval is a process that goes
through reviewing ones research to make sure that you're engaging in an ethical
set of practices so it's an important point apart important part of research
to ensure that you get feedback from colleagues from people who are
thoughtful about ethical practice to make sure that you're operating in a way
that that protects those who you're you're seeking to engage with
so in actual fact I sort of view them as sort of connected similar and necessary
I think you can be in ethical researcher and not necessarily need that makes
approval but also in terms of being and ethical researchers about the types of
questions you're asking how you're asking them what your research is about
what you're trying to gain from it
so you know there's obviously those questions that are involved about is it
for profit is it for company is it for you know some sort of external I guess
benefit or is it for the benefit of research for the really important
difference between ethics approval and being an ethical researcher in some ways
I think there probably is a tick box you can sort of go through the processes
you know just sort of answer all the questions we answer the questions that
people want what Judah answer but it's not necessarily the same has been
difficult researcher the local researcher is actually thinking of your
of the people you want to work with your that we want to interview the people
that you want to engage with and actually thinking about what you're
doing for them
research at its best is a two-way process a real engagement is a two-way
process with both parties benefit both the the research on his case myself and
the communities that I work with and to benefit for them to benefit i really
have to understand what they need to get out of this research project and so
being ethical researcher is taking that boy approached once you have that board
approach that bought a philosophy embraced and you put the people that
you're interviewing first and in the center you know people simply thinking
then equal processes
simply follow it's quite a much easier process to do if you start from that
first position of being an ethical researcher and then moving on to ethics
that you should start thinking that if it's as soon as you got you have your
project decided and you should be having conversations with your supervisors
about what ethics you would need what the time frames are to get those ethics
and you probably should set aside a good six months at the start of your project
both to familiarize yourself with what's already been done but also plan
your protocols have planned the journey that you think your participants will
take with your research you need to start thinking about ethics very very
early and for the most part
starting to think about ethics includes your methodology and usually you start
thinking about your methodology early
you have your question what you want to do then you have to think about how am I
going to get this information
what impact does that have on the people that I might be talking to or the
organization i might be working with or the institution where i need to actually
participate with people so as part of those early discussions and ideas about
your methodology have to think okay
how would this fit into this application process because it's not reasonable to
think about your methodology right when you need to apply for ethics it's too
late
so you need to be thinking about it at least three to six months in advance
before you apply for ethics exactly how you want to do this so inevitably there
are challenges when you are asking for ethics one that really comes to mind is
when we asked for any approval to video in a cesarean section
the contact between the mother and the baby and what we were doing was an
ethnographic research which meant just purely observation it wasn't an
intervention
however the ethics committee couldn't understand that we weren't going to be
intervening and they were asking for protocols and they wanted to know a
sample size and so there was a clear misunderstanding of the methodology and
this went on for quite a long time until I wrote to the chair of the the ethics
committee and suggested that we come and actually talk to them and present to
them
what actually a photography was in order for them to understand and make a better
decision and he very quickly ended up passing that ethics approval but we had
a long process trying to get them to understand the methodology we are using
was not an intervention
yeah absolutely i think for the most part it has to do with the timing
really
because the timing has to be just right because you know the ethics committee
only meets especially if it's some of the research that I do where the
questions I'm asking people are very sensitive
the population groups i'm interested in indigenous populations people with
disabilities people in vulnerable
settings it has to take time to go through the ethics committee so you have
to really plan things out
accordingly otherwise you might miss the meeting that your population group is
having where you wanted to do the focus group and they're not going to meet
again for another six months
and so you really have to be ahead of the game and on top of the ball in terms
of making your plan so that you develop your research obviously in a way that's
going to fulfill the research agenda that you're going for but also working
with the people that you need to work with so that it gets through at the
right time so i think the process of ethics approval should be a conversation
with the ethics offices so every time I submit an ethics I never expected it's
just going to sell through first go without any modifications
it's being put in front of a committee that committee has community experts
University professional staff on those committees who are experienced and they
might pick up on something that you haven't thought of
so it's an ongoing conversation that they might come back with points that
you might not have thought of you then can address those points you can modify
your protocol you send it back and and ultimately you should be able to get
ethics approval so that you're happy with your project and they agree that
it's done in an ethical way so i wouldn't expect that you would just
write it up submit and get tickets done
you have to think of it as a journey that you're going to go on and
conversations with those committees and experts ethics and the ethics approval
is meant to sort of help you and if you treat it as something that is assisted
or assistive and positive than an actual fact you walk away from it
enhancing your research project and making it better if you think you've got
a good idea
don't give up you will find a way there are ways to do research
ethically you just need to be persistent get advice and get supported
doing research for its own sake
I mean in terms of getting information and being able to use that is important
but I guess doing research simply to write a paper and you know that's the
end of it is perhaps not as far as research could actually go or the best
use of your time getting ethics approval because you really want to be able to
use that research to make a difference in some way
anyone who is undertaking research should be my mother this is my belief
we're doing it to make the world a better place we're doing it to improve
the lives of of people
we're doing it to advance knowledge so that should always be a promise not all
I've got this idea i'm really curious and I i I'd like to go and see you know
what we can do with this
so if you keep that as the heart of what you're doing and you are able to explain
that well then you know getting ethics approval is not going to be a
problematic thing