Factiva

Ethics committees overstate the importance of privacy at the expense of research, write Greg Bamber and Jennifer Sappey

RESEARCHERS are awaiting the new national statement on ethical conduct in human research. The statement has been produced by the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Australian Research Council. The new statement should be tabled in parliament this year, then implemented by universities and other institutions. Implementation poses big challenges for such institutions if they are to remedy the harm done to social science research under existing protocols.

Human research ethics committees were created after the World Health Organisation's Declaration of Helsinki, to try to ensure that research on health-type issues would be conducted ethically. One positive aspect of the "ethics industry" is that it has induced people to plan their research more systematically. However, this also tends to inhibit exploratory and serendipitous research.

There is concern among social scientists about how the new statement may be implemented by university HRECs. An unintended consequence of these committees is that some researchers feel the need to try to fly below the HREC radar. Social scientists may feel obliged toadopt the paradigms of health-type researchers.

Interpretations of the 1999 statement by HRECs have varied from institution to institution. The social science technique of "snowball sampling" (participant referral) is banned by one university although it is allowed in others. Another HREC has insisted that when an interview is recorded, participants must be advised of their right to review, edit or erase the recording. It can seriously disrupt a project if participants can erase the recording at any stage.

With interviews, the HES has reported that one university restricts home visits, even with the mandatory chaperone present, in case there are charges of impropriety. That university also mandates there is to be no interviewing after dark and interviews must be conducted in an open area near housing or a busy road.

The inconsistency of HRECs is also an ethical concern since it is a matter of fairness. One social scientist has observed that HRECs tend to be "the most unethical of committees". It has been pointed out that some HRECs try to intervene in research design in ways that have no apparent connection with ethics.

Some HREC protocols are in conflict with an important strand of social science research: workplace case studies. These have often included observation of behaviour. Such methods are significant in many fields including industrial anthropology and sociology, employment relations and human resource management.

These studies have presented worker "truth" as well as that of management, perhaps by using participant observation as a worker. This is deemed by many HRECs to be covert research and unacceptable. Yet such methods have helped those in vulnerable positions and have yielded many important insights (into corruption, for example). Such ethnographic studies have shown there is a range of interests in workplaces. They may challenge a unitary view of the workplace as essentially harmonious, which chief executives and their spin doctors seek to promote. This challenge is significant because it seems likely that under the new statement many HRECs will continue with their practice of requiring a researcher to obtain written consent from a chief executive or the equivalent before beginning a case study. A condition of granting consent may be the opportunity to veto output.

How well does this correlate with the university principle that research is the pursuit of truth? In the case of workplace studies, it is reasonable to ask: whose truth -- that of the chief executive, other managers, workers or customers? Chief executives' denial of access or their selective filtering of the information provided could deny the work force's (or customers') right to have their truth told.

Chief executives are unlikely to consent to access to an organisation unless favourable outcomes for the chief can be assured, and it is unlikely that HREC approval will be granted unless there is such consent. An unintended consequence may be a research focus that is at best one-sided and at worst misleading.

We must also ask whether a chief executive's consent is only a token, with no guarantee that the study can be completed. Under some HREC regimes, researchers must get written consent from every participant in the organisation. Some such forms use words that may frighten potential participants with exaggerated statements about the risks associated with research.

One project involving written consent from a chief executive, granting a researcher full access to the work force, was thwarted by a middle manager as gatekeeper to her staff; she also was being protective of her performance bonus. This was her right under the present statement guidelines. The study had to be abandoned without recourse to the chief executive in case the manager suffered harm from her chief executive once the researcher identified her unwillingness to participate. In such a situation it is the researcher whose reputation is besmirched for what is deemed to be a failure to complete the study.

HRECs should not only focus on procedural protection. They should also encompass the interests of vulnerable people: for example, their rights to their story and to their version of the truth being told. Many of the seminal workplace studies from the 1930s to the '90s would not have gained HREC approval under the present protocols.

In view of their health-research paradigm, there is a tendency for HRECs to err on the side of being risk-averse, overstating the importance of consent and of the welfare and privacy of participants, while giving too little weight to the benefits of research to society. In social science research the risks are invariably much lower than in health research.

For this reason it would be worth having separate HRECs for health scientists. In the social sciences and humanities, consent should be required only in certain cases, where for example there is potential for defined and specified harm. There should be better mechanisms for researchers to contest a refusal of consent.

We hope that HRECs will not interpret the new statement as absolute commandments that must be applied to all types of research. Rather, they should see it as a set of principles that are applied to different fields of research in a thoughtful and relevant way. One of the key roles of HRECs should be to facilitate useful research, not to distort or confound it.

As for researchers, they should discuss these issues with their HRECs. They should engage with the ethics processes in constructive ways rather than just filling in forms and passively accepting edicts.

This is a summary of a paper presented Greg Bamber, of the Griffith Business School, and Jennifer Sappey, of Charles Sturt University, at the Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand conference in Auckland this month.

[AUS_T-20070221-1-040-496631 ]

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