Regulatory Power: Can a Feminist Poststructuralist Engage in Research Oversight?

Abstract

This personal narrative focuses on a specific experience with the regulation and potential discrediting of diverse forms of research-service as the chairperson of an institutional review board. An attempt to adjust to contemporary legislative expectations for the protection of human participants in research in one institutional setting is described. Because of the complex, ambiguous, multivocal, and political nature of research and research regulation, the author has come to believe that qualitative researchers who become informed critical activists regarding research ethics and regulation are immediately needed as voices in the construction of appropriate practices that would protect all those involved-subjects/participants, researchers, volunteer academic reviewers, individual informants, the general public-while at the same tiome facilitating respect for research diversity. Valued qualitative research constructs-emergence, reflexivity, and the recognition of power and political agendas that place ethical practice and research diversity at the forefront of public discourses-are discussed as essential to the critical regulation of research.

Ethical Review and Children's Research in Ireland

“…Only quite recently have specific national guidelines been developed for social science and humanities research, and existing general guidelines have been reviewed to include special concerns to be considered in the review of this type of research (Boulton et al, 2004;ESRC, 2006;PRE, 2004). There is an acknowledgement that more needs to be done to communicate and explore the specific ethical challenges that qualitative researchers encounter in their research, not just for the benefit of the research ethics community that is going to adjudicate on the research proposals (Cannella, 2004;Connolly and Reid, 2007;hemmings, 2006), but also within the researcher community that is planning research projects (Burke, 2007).…”

Looking from the Outside/In: Re-thinking Research Ethics Review

“…Researchers do this as well, thereby sustaining an unhelpful dichotomy that doesn't support them in working through complex, real-world research ethics issues. Finally, as Cannella (2004) argues, most researchers rarely address the "… broader issues of […] ethics from within the modernist creation that is research" (p. 236):…”

“…What concerns me, however, is the way in which both sets of principles still supported a narrow conception of "research ethics". Cannella (2004) eloquently argues that…”

Are we ethical? Approaches to ethics in management and organisation research

“…Criticisms often direct blame on review boards having evolved from a medical framework, which are considered to lack understanding of ethical problems in social research (Perlman, 2006). It is also argued that boards are disproportionately comprised of quantitative researchers who do not fully grasp the nature of qualitative research (Goode, 1999;Johnson, 2014;Schrag, 2011), lack appropriate training (Boden et al, 2009;Schrag, 2011) and a critical reflexivity in their approach (Cannella, 2004). Indeed, qualitative submissions to review boards, particularly ethnographic research (Boden et al, 2009), are more liable to be rejected for failing to provide sufficient detail in terms of the intended process of data collection and protection (Bell and Thorpe, 2013;Hedgecoe, 2008;Schrag, 2011).…”