InFrame

Written by Caitlin McDonald, InFrame project coordinator at the University of St Andrews

Research Ethics as the Foundation for Research Culture Projects

HSS [Humanities and Social Sciences] researchers do nothing that begins to compare with injecting someone with potentially toxic green stuff that cannot be neutralised or rapidly eliminated from their body if something goes wrong. At most there is a potential for causing minor and reversible emotional distress or some measure of reputational damage.” (Dingwall, 2008)

It is true that the types of research that we conduct in organisational culture projects would not inflict the same levels of harm caused by unethical medical research  in the dim and distant past (thanks to the implementation of the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki). Yet in today’s work, mitigation of even ‘minor’ distress and reputational damage should be at the forefront of any research design.

The InFrame Culture Catalyst Fund (CCF) funded 26 short-term, diverse and interdisciplinary projects across the Universities of St Andrews, Glasgow and Edinburgh. These projects were designed to create culture change within the sector, primarily by using methods aligned to social sciences such as surveys, focus groups and interviews, evaluations, and narrative and network analysis. With projects looking into the experiences of staff and PGRs who have experienced gender-based microaggressions, , and , to name just a few, it is clear that the element of risk of harm to participants could potentially cause at least “minor and reversible emotional distress or some measure of reputational damage”, or worse, if not adequately mitigated. Indeed, while it is most likely that respondents to interviews or surveys would not experience any harm, it would be against the values of our project to introduce any level of risk to participants, given that we are trying to create conditions for a fairer, more inclusive and considerate research culture.

At first glance, it may seem that issuing a survey to colleagues across the University may not bring any immediate distress, but issues of data protection, confidentiality, anonymity and re-use of data could quickly make a serious problem of an honest survey response.

The key to preventing this, and to ensuring colleagues could confidently engage the research with the appropriate assurances, was ensuring that all CCF Project Leads understood the risks of doing research with human participants, and ways in which they could be mitigated.

We supported all our funded projects to undergo a structured ethical review process.

This might seem straightforward, but with Project Leads from all subject areas, job families and seniorities, and spanning three institutions, we needed to create a system that would work for everyone. Given that many of these projects crossed both disciplines and institutions, we needed appropriate disciplinary diversity in the panel members also.  We first considered how we use the local School or Department ethics processes? Would an ethics panel from the School of Physics be suited to reviewing what would be primarily considered social science research? Which process would Research Professional Leads have access to? There was also the challenge that going through local ethics processes could cause delays, leading to CCF projects receiving approval at different times, and upsetting tight project delivery deadlines and creating disparity among the Project Leads.

Testing a cross-university ethical approval process

To solve these challenges and ensure that all CCF projects received the same standard of review, with those trained in scrutinising projects with human participants, the InFrame team created a bespoke, cross-institutional short-term subcommittee to act as ethics reviewers. The subcommittee was led by the University of St Andrews, situated underneath their University Teaching and Research Ethics Committee (UTREC), and consisted of representatives from all three partner institutions, who were experienced in reviewing ethics for the social sciences through their local committees.

We then had the problem of creating a single system that would work for all three universities and provide the necessary systems access. We created a form on a Microsoft Word document, the easiest system and one that all staff could access no matter which institution they belonged to giving fair access to the process.  The Ethics Application form asked Project Leads to consider their research design, how risk would be mitigated, and how the data of participants would be collected, protected, and if/how it might be shared openly. The review was intended to be streamlined and supportive and the Ethics Committee members’ feedback was designed to be clear and developmental – considering that for many Project Leads this was their first attempt at an ethics form. While many of the projects had to review and resubmit their ethics applications, this process of refining their studies ensured that all the projects were able to complete their projects with confidence that they were of a high ethical standard.

As the rapidly changing sector tries to find efficient solutions to challenges with collaborative working and shared services, the InFrame CCF ethics panel serves as an example of a collegial and positive method of managing ethics for cross-institutional projects, with both the Project Leads and committee members benefitting from this approach and being able to share the learnings from this trial within their own teams. We came together to share the learnings through a webinar, which you can access for free here.

Find out more via our project documentation files on the Open Science Framework.