Many criminologists have expressed serious concerns about the impact of research ethics governance on their work. Drawing on written submissions and interviews with criminologists and ethics administrators conducted in 2003 and 2004, this report examines:

1. the impact of research ethics governance on criminologists;

2. major ethical issues that criminologists encounter; and

3. strategies for improving criminologists’ understanding of ethical matters and the system that regulates them.

Ethics and the governance of criminological research in Australia

The regulatory scope of Human Research Ethics Committees can be problematic for a variety of reasons. Some scholars have argued the ethics approval process, for example, is antithetical to certain disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, while others are willing to give it qualified support. This article uses a case study to cast the debate about how to address the weaknesses in ethics approval processes into the context of an ever-increasing level of managerialist interference in the work carried out by researchers. The problems attached to the former are unlikely to be resolved, while the latter is allowed to continue.

/pdf/the-ethics-and-politics-of-ethics-approval-1akp0zejh4.pdf

The ethics and politics of ethics approval

The regulatory guidelines on obtaining informed consent require that all protocols be reviewed by an ethics review committee; in addition study information must be presented to volunteers by the research teams in simple and understandable language, to ensure they are able to give informed consent for their participation. Despite the innovative methods that have been developed over the years to improve informed consent, the informed consent process is still a difficult subject and not fully understood particularly in developing countries.

Objective: In this study I sought to understand and evaluate the informed consent process as perceived by the different actors in two HIV clinical trials and how their understandings and interpretation of the process are reflected in standardized informed consent guidelines.

Methodology: The actors included: members of the ethics review committee, senior researchers, the field research teams, the community advisory board members and the research volunteers. Data were collected using semi-structured interview guides and focus group discussion guides and unstructured observation and document review.

Results: A total of sixty three respondents took part in this study. I found that although the informed consent process is emphasised in research ethics guidelines and clinical research protocols which are approved by the ethics research committees before they are implemented, how the process is perceived and interpreted by the actors is very varied. The different actors’ beliefs, values, gender, trust, power differentials and decision making all contribute to the negotiations that take place during the informed consent process. The standardised informed consent guidelines are a useful tool to manage the bureaucracy of conducting research in order to protect research volunteers from any form of harm and allow for individual autonomy; it is however the relationships and interactions of the different actors which are built over time during the research process that in practice lead to a meaningful informed consent process as each actor interprets and understands the process within their own context and experience.

Understanding the informed consent process in HIV clinical trials in Uganda : a case study

Australian creative practice researchers are not alone in their quest for an appropriate framework for human ethics research committee consent. Globally, there seem to be similar tensions. Although Australia's National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research was revamped in 2007 to be more inclusive of specific creative practice research, including long-form journalism and other creative non-fiction writing, many tertiary Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs) have not evolved with it. Instead, a conservative stasis pertaining to the previous medical/scientific paradigm remains the default position. This paper details a submission to an Australian university's HREC calling for a human ethics application process that more appropriately contextualises creative practice human research. Additionally, it proposes an informed consent letter that addresses tensions around the withdrawal of “data” based on the journalistic practice of “on the record/off the record”. The revised Australian National Statem...

Contextualising Creative Practice Within Human Research Ethics Processes

The Australian Health Ethics Committee's National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Research Involving Humans (1999) expanded the health and medical focus of preceding statements by including all disciplines of research. The Statement purports to promote a uniformly high ethical standard for this expanded range of research, and is endorsed by, inter alia, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Australian Academy of Science, and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. High ethical standards should apply to all research involving humans. However, uniformity in the review processes of disparate research endeavors is not a necessary condition for uniformly high ethical standards. Bringing the ethical review of all research under a model which has developed within the context of health and medical research ethics for over thirty years may be inappropriate and at times incoherent. The language, methods, nature and products of research in areas such as the Humanities are often very different from those of health, medical and other sciences. The Behavioral and Social Sciences Ethics Review Committee at The University of Queensland (UQ) had, since the mid-1980s, considered that the guidelines of the time did, in fact, cover all aspects of human experimentation. We describe the ways in which this position was implemented, how issues raised by the new wording in the National Statement have been recently managed by UQ's research ethics committees, and point to outstanding questions.

Ethics of research involving humans: Uniform processes for disparate categories?

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Ethics of research involving humans: Uniform processes for disparate categories?