Glasgow Centre for International Development

Additional Resources

Here you will find other resources related to ethical working that you may wish to explore. If you are aware of additional resources that should be added to this page please contact Mary Ryan at Mary.Ryan@glasgow.ac.uk 

• UKCDR and ESSENCE on Health Research’s Good Practice Document, ‘Four Approaches to Supporting Equitable Research Partnerships’ - The Good Practice Document aims to support equity in research partnerships by assisting funders, research organizations and researchers to improve their ways of working in multi-country research consortia, particularly in relation to low- and middle- income country (LMIC) contexts.

• Ethics of Health Systems Research - All too often ethical reflection, review, and analysis is treated as something that occurs in elite spaces, among people higher up, behind closed doors, or in institutional review boards. Sometimes it is viewed as a one-off element in the research process that occurs before research even begins. But making ethical practice a day-to-day part of our daily routine as health systems researchers is crucial to research excellence. You don’t have to be an ethics expert to do this – although ethics expertise can contribute great advice, which we have drawn on in this resource. Our hope is that this website can be a resource for health systems researchers to find and share information to support practical, applied ethics.

• Ethical Action in Global Research - This website and toolkit has been brought together by more than 200 global researchers from more than 30 countries to inform and support ethical choices in global research. This is a temporary website and they are developing a more interactive one. Please do share both these resources – UofE want to make sure they are as well used as possible. Also, they welcome any feedback from colleagues who use them. They’re very much intended to be dynamic resources so the groups who have created them are keen to enhance them.

• Critical Resource for Ethical International Partnerships - When we start a new project with partners in a different context, it is never truly a “new start.” Historically it has been experts from the Global North who have studied and interpreted the South. This means that international research partnerships are inevitably imbued with power relations and possibly the assumption that it is northern knowledge that will lead transformations of in the South. Without a clear recognition of that context, it is inevitable that existing inequities, injustices, and imbalances of knowledge and power, will continue to pervade our work. The Sustainable Futures in Africa team designed this resource to help make explicit the practices and dynamics that underpin partnerships, to support the development of more equitable working relations.

• Online Ethics Course - This is a short online introductory course (freely available to all researchers) that aims to highlight some of the ethical issues that can arise with social research (specifically in health-related topics but it does have wider relevance) and possible ways of addressing them. We hope it might be useful both to ethics committee members and researchers applying for ethics review. A certificate of completion is available once a minimum score of 80% is achieved in the final quiz section.

• Distanced Research Toolkit - The University of Stirling, in partnership with colleagues from University of Cape Town (UCT), Universidade Estadual Paulista - São Paulo State University - (UNESP) and Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), has developed a Distanced Research Toolkit that will support and enable researchers and those supporting research to work together virtually. The Toolkit will help to catalyse equitable research and knowledge exchange activities between institutions in the Global South and the Global North. 

• Guidance to Anticipate, Mitigate and Address Harm in Research - On behalf of major funders of international development research, UK Collaborative for Development Research (UKCDR) is publishing a set of principles and best practice guidance on safeguarding to anticipate, mitigate and address potential and actual harms in the process of international development research, along with a ‘companion piece’ on the practical application of this guidance during COVID-19. This new guidance has been developed over the past 18 months, in consultation with international development experts across the globe following a commitment made in 2018 by the Department for International Development, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Department of Health and Social Care, UK research and Innovation and Wellcome to jointly raise standards of behaviour across the sector.

• GCRF Gender Equality Statement Toolkit - A suite of material developed by the University of Edinburgh to help researcher think critically about gender in their projects and developing strong Gender Equality Statements

• Course: Community Engagement: An Exploration - A resource that dips into some of the many 'what?', 'why' and 'how?' considerations related to community engagement. The course is an invitation to staff and students across all University of Glasgow Schools and Colleges, as well as partners and communities, to explore, reflect and discuss community engagement.

• Article: A framework for ethical research in international and comparative education.  Through analysis of existing guidelines and questionnaire responses, this article demonstrates that more ethical guidance is needed to support international and comparative education researchers. A new framework is put forward centred on five core ethical values – transparency and honesty, respect and care, conscious freedom, experiential and tacit awareness and reflexive practice – situated on an axis of universality and enacted through co-constructive dialogue. While this paper highlights an international and comparative educational perspective, the issues raised are relevant for anyone working in international contexts.