If Ethics Committees were Designed for Ethnography

Abstract

WHERE DID THE ETHICS REVIEW PROCESS go wrong for qualitative research, and how can we make it right, or at least better? This paper begins with an excerpt from an ethnography of attempting to attend an ethics review-related workshop, which exemplifies that the ethics-review process is based on epistemological assumptions aligned with positivistic research, and does not fit the qualitative research process. We suggest that a new format for ethics review, based on assumptions associated with qualitative research and ethnography, might be a better fit. In this model the researcher becomes the expert and the committee the learner or ethnographer. In this process the ethics review process is guided by four core open-ended questions that facilitate a fuller and richer exchange of information. The second part of this paper presents strategies that may lessen the risks associated with the unknown or emergent aspects of qualitative research. These strategies include a dual consent process and the co-opting of journal editors or thesis review boards to review ethical considerations prior to publication or sign off, and a renewed focus of ethics training.

Reflections concerning ethnographic ethical decisions and neo-liberal monitoring

“…Yet, the focus of anticipatory regulatory regimes on ensuring informed consent and prevention of harm to research subjects does have the benefit of compelling ethnographers to reflect on at least those two elements. Also, to be sure, there are preparatory, anticipatory steps and mechanisms that may contribute to conducting ethically sound research, such as the establishment of professional codes of conduct, the identification and discussion of possible ethical issues before they arise in the field, and even the effort put into procedural ethics -that is, in the search for approval by ethics committees (Guillemin and Gillam 2004) -notwithstanding the fact that it may encompass an element of deception as inductive research models are disguised within a deductive frame (Tolich and Fitzgerald 2006).…”

“…That is, anticipatory regulatory regimes are unfit for supporting or enabling ethnography (Katz 2006;Tolich and Fitzgerald 2006;Allbutt and Masters 2010). This is apparent in at least three areas: the nature of ethics, the time of ethical decision making, and the ethical subject.…”

“…In reality things usually not only go through several shades of grey -just like moving through the continuum of overtness and covertness in researchers' rolesbut also forwards and backwards. In any case, to be consistent, that kind of informed consent would probably need to go through at least two stages: the beginning and the end -that is, the publication -of the research (Tolich and Fitzgerald 2006), namely in order to account for the difference between internal and external confidentiality (Tolich 2004).…”

“…Wanting to apply it ipsis verbis to ethnography can only lead to smothering ethnographic practice, either by preventing it from being carried out or by leading to mitigated forms of ethnography, based not so much on prolonged participant observation but instead on more controllable, formalized, research strategies such as interviews and focus groups. Such strategies are more easily adaptable to checklists of rights and wrongs than ethnography, where data collection is iterative (Murphy and Dingwall 2007), unbounded, and the research process usually far from linear (Tolich and Fitzgerald 2006). We should add that in our interactions with colleagues from Anglophone countries we have actually come to realize that some of our research would never have been approved by their ethics committees -even if, at the end, and to the best of our knowledge, no real harm emerged for anyone involved.…”

“…To be sure, this does not constitute by itself sufficient motive to exempt ethnographies from external ethical appreciation. However, together with the aforementioned differences in the research processes, it may make ethnographers less sympathetic to such appreciations, particularly when conducted a priori by people who tend to have little knowledge of ethnography, or even qualitative social research for that matter (Tolich and Fitzgerald 2006). Of course, it is not only a question of different research models.…”