April 2011
Ted
Palys and John Lowman of the School of Criminology,
Simon Fraser University, find that the second edition of Canada’s Tri-Council
Policy Statement (TCPS2), released in December 2010, offers significant
improvements over the first edition of 1998.
[Ted Palys and John Lowman, "What’s Been Did and
What’s Been Hid: Reflections on TCPS2," 18 January 2011].
On the positive side, they find that "The section that has been one of our
primary foci over the years – the policy’s provisions regarding privacy and
confidentiality – has improved to the point where it is respectful of different
epistemological and moral perspectives, offers protections for research
participants, and reminds both researchers and the institutions in which they
work of their duties and obligations. To that extent, TCPS2 represents an
exemplary policy that other nations can emulate."
While they would have liked the document to offer better legal advice, they
appreciate the ethical advice it gives to researchers and institutions about
their duty to honor pledges of confidentiality.
They also applaud TCPS2’s new Chapter 10 on qualitative research, provided it is
correctly employed: To the extent that Chapter 10 elaborates principles that
differentiate qualitative from quantitative and/or experimental research designs
– for example, it allows an emergent research design, and authorizes researchers
to avoid the legalistic relationship implied by a signed consent form – it will
force REBs to be more sensitive to the protocols of qualitative methods. To the
extent that it adequately captures qualitative approaches, it may serve as an
example of the sort of experience and expertise that is required on REBs that
review qualitative research. However, if REB members use the chapter on
qualitative methods as a "Coles Notes" course enabling them to claim that they
have developed that expertise, we will all be in trouble.
Palys and Lowman are less sanguine about TCPS2’s
efforts to combat "the inappropriate imposition of biomedical practices and
solutions that may make sense in relation to biomedical/experimental research,
but would be epistemologically inappropriate and sometimes unethical in a more
qualitative field-based context."
For
example:
Though senior university officials, such as vice presidents for research, are
prohibited from attending REB meetings, their appointees can and do. How does
this prevent conflict of interest?
REB
"community members" are supposed to represent the perspective of research
participants, but they are never recruited from the ranks of
homeless persons, intravenous drug users, drug dealers, sex workers, and
prisoners studied by criminologists.
TCPS fails to give adequate "guidance about when establishing multiple REBs
would be desirable," so that qualitative researchers may still find themselves
at the mercy of quantitative, medical researchers who do not understand the work
they are reviewing.
Still, they end on a hopeful note. While TCPS2 is flawed, it is an improvement
over TCPS1. And the three councils that created the policy statement can
continue to collect feedback, eventually leading to an even better TCPS3.
I
share their cautious optimism. The final version does include some troubling
language. In their comments on an earlier draft, Palys
and Lowman noted that it could promote "ethics creep" by "broadening the concept
of ‘welfare’ to include not only the individual research participant but also
everything of concern in that person’s life world." The final TCPS 2 does just
that, stating that the welfare of groups can also be affected by research.
Groups may benefit from the knowledge gained from the research, but they may
also suffer from stigmatization, discrimination or damage to reputation.
Engagement during the design process with groups whose welfare may be affected
by the research can help to clarify the potential impact of the research and
indicate where any negative impact on welfare can be minimized. Researchers must
also consider the risks and potential benefits of their research and the
knowledge it might generate for the welfare of society as a whole.
On
the other hand, chapter 10 does take pains to explain to REBs how qualitative
researchers work, and the differences between their ethics and methods and those
of biomedical researchers. REBs, it cautions, should accept projects that focus
on just a few people, or people more powerful than the researchers. They can
expect some researchers to produce "research that is
critical of settings and systems, or the power of those being studied." Consent
may be "dynamic, negotiated, and ongoing," rather than spelled out in advance.
While some qualitative researchers may offer confidentiality, others (including
oral historians) show "respect for the participant’s contribution . . . by
identifying the individual in research publications, or other means of
dissemination of the results from the research." REBs should not expect fixed
protocols, since "Specific questions or other elements of data collection may be
difficult to anticipate, identify and articulate fully in the research proposal
in advance of the project’s implementation."
In short, TCPS2 calls on REBs to evaluate qualitative research in ways wholly
unlike the ways they evaluate quantitative, biomedical research.
Whether that will happen is another question. Canadian researchers have told me
that in practice, university REBs ignore the TCPS in
favor of American-style ethical imperialism.
Nor has the Panel on Research Ethics explained why we need REB review of
qualitative research in the first place. Forcing every project to go through the
REB is a massive burden, even if the REB finds the right clause in TCPS2 that
will allow the project to proceed as designed. If qualitative researchers had an
established record of abusing research participants, and if REBs had an
established record of preventing such abuses, that would be one thing. But in
the absence of such evidence, I don’t see why all of this is necessary.
Still, so far as recognition of ethical and methodological pluralism goes, I am
inclined to regard TCPS2 as the state of the art. More sophisticated than the
Belmont Report or equivalent documents in the United Kingdom or Australia, it
suggests what can happen when social scientists are allowed to participate in
discussions of research ethics, and when government bodies revise their guidance
in light of experience.
Institutional Review Blog, February 4, 2011
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