Linguist condemns "moral depravity of ethics protocols"

George van Driem, Professor of Historical Linguistics at the University of Bern, minces no words in condemning the “moral depravity of ethics protocols.” He argues that human subjects rules primarily serve to cover the asses of Western universities while hampering linguists in the field and insulting the people they encounter. Paraphrasing couldn’t do justice to this marvelous essay, so enjoy the block quotations. Better still, read the whole thing.

[George van Driem, “Endangered Language Research and the Moral Depravity of Ethics Protocols,” Language Documentation & Conservation 10 (2016): 243–252, http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24693].

Wynn Calls for Department-Level Review of Student Research

L. L. Wynn, an anthropologist at Macquarie University and a member of that university’s Human Research Ethics Committee, spoke to 40 teachers and administrators at 14 Australian universities. She finds that “opportunities for independent undergraduate human research are being eroded by expanding ethics bureaucracies” and that “the ethics review process [is] a significant obstacle to universities and teachers who wish to incorporate original human research into the curriculum.” (7) She calls for the devolution of ethics review to individual departments.

[L. L. Wynn, “The Impact of Ethics Review on a Research-Led University Curriculum Results of a Qualitative Study in Australia,” Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, Published online before print, March 16, 2016, doi:10.1177/1556264616636234.]

Oral Historians as Ethical Proofreaders

Kevin Bradley and Anisa Puri of the Australian Generations Oral History Project explain that the ethical challenges they faced came after they had conducted the interviews.

[Kevin Bradley and Anisa Puri, “Creating an Oral History Archive: Digital Opportunities and Ethical Issues,” Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 1 (2016): 75–91, doi:10.1080/1031461X.2015.1122072.]

University of Queensland Punishes Researchers, Won't Say Why

The University of Queensland demoted a professor and blocked him and another researcher from publishing findings, based on charges that they had not obtained necessary ethics clearances. But the university will not explain its conduct.

[Jorge Branco. “UQ Suppressed Bus Racism Study: Academics.” Brisbane Times, February 27, 2015. Thanks to Michelle Meyer for tweeting this to my attention.]

Mark Israel Questions Lists of Vulnerabilities

Mark Israel, Winthrop Professor of Law at the University of Western Australia, sees problems with mandatory ethics review but doubts that they can be fixed by limiting such review to projects involving "specific vulnerable groups."

[Mark Israel, “Rolling Back the Bureaucracies of Ethics Review.” Journal of Medical Ethics (October 2, 2012), DOI:10.1136/medethics-2012-100942.]

Schrag Responds to Responses to Schrag

The June 2012 issue of Research Ethics features four responses to my December 2011 essay, "The Case Against Ethics Review in the Social Sciences." Three scholars based in Canada wrote a joint response, while three in Britain wrote individual replies. I am grateful to all of the respondents for their attention, kind words, and challenging critiques.

• Nicholls, Stuart G., Jamie Brehaut, and Raphae Saginur. “Social Science and Ethics Review: A Question of Practice Not Principle.” Research Ethics 8, no. 2 (June 2012): 71–78. doi:10.1177/1747016112445435
• Hedgecoe, Adam. “The Problems of Presumed Isomorphism and the Ethics Review of Social Science: A Response to Schrag.” Research Ethics 8, no. 2 (June 2012): 79–86. doi:10.1177/1747016112445437
• Jennings, Sean. “Response to Schrag: What Are Ethics Committees for Anyway? A Defence of Social Science Research Ethics Review.” Research Ethics 8, no. 2 (June 2012): 87–96. doi:10.1177/1747016112445423
• Bond, Tim. “Ethical Imperialism or Ethical Mindfulness? Rethinking Ethical Review for Social Sciences.” Research Ethics 8, no. 2 (June 2012): 97–112. doi:10.1177/1747016112445423

Since the responses overlap somewhat in their themes, I think it best for me to respond to them collectively.

Could Guidance and Feedback Replace Rote Compliance?

Murray Dyck and Gary Allen, both of Griffith University in Australia, argue that "the review process should be an advisory and collegial one—not one that focuses on compliance, enforcement and gatekeeping."

[Murray Dyck and Gary Allen. “Is Mandatory Research Ethics Reviewing Ethical?” Journal of Medical Ethics (August 3, 2012), DOI: 10.1136/medethics-2011-100274.]

Report on Research Compliance on ANPRM

The August issue of Report on Research Compliance covers ANPRM.

["Human Research Protections Prerule Mandates Regs for Non-Govt. Studies," Report on Research Compliance, August 2011]

The report has a statement from Art Caplan:

“These are long-overdue changes,” Art Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, told RRC. “The current system involves too much red tape and paperwork in proportion to the protection given to subjects. In some ways the system of human subjects protection — informed consent and review by IRBs [i.e., institutional review boards] — has been hijacked by legal concerns so that more attention is given to institutional and investigator protection than subject empower- ment. These changes help remedy that problem.”

Your humble blogger is also quoted, complaining about the lack of attention to the experience of other countries. I did overlook ANPRM's footnote 28: "Cribb R. Ethical regulation and humanities research in Australia: Problems and consequences. Monash Bioethics Rev 2004;23(3):39–57." Other than that, has anyone found references to the workings of ethics committees in other countries?

Australian Political Scientist: "Causing Harm . . . May Be the Whole Point"

Anthony Langlois, Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia, and a former member and chair of that university's Social and Behavioural Research Ethics Committee, finds that Australia's 2007 National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research is an improvement over earlier policies, but that it still leaves an "ill fit between the requirements of [the medical] model of research ethics review and the nature of humanities and social sciences research."

[Anthony J. Langlois, "Political  Research  and  Human  Research  Ethics  Committees," Australian Journal of Political Science 46 (2011): 139-154, DOI: 10.1080/10361146.2010.544287. Also available as a preliminary preprint. Thanks to Professor Langlois for mentioning the essay on socialsciencepsace.com.]

Psychologist Blasts "Taxonomic Chaos"

John J. Furedy, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Toronto, has posted, "Implications for Australian Research of the Taxonomic Chaos in the Canadian Bioethics Industry: Après Moi le Deluge," originally presented at a June 2009 ethics conference in Australia. Though Furedy's expertise is in experimental psychology--a field outside the scope of this blog--his paper is relevant to the social sciences and humanities as well.

Furedy, who himself served for decades on ethics committees, argues that Canadian research ethics boards worked pretty well until the early 1990s. But since then bioethicists "have created taxonomic chaos by conflating such distinctions as the distinction between ethical and epistemological issues, or the differences among medical drug evaluation studies, psychological experiments, and sociological surveys."

He offers three specific complaints:

1. "REBs have taken it upon themselves to judge not only whether the proposed research is ethical, but also whether it is scientifically valid. But research-design issues for a particular piece of research require a specific sort of epistemological expertise which most REB members do not possess."

2. "The Tri-Council committee has succeeded in persuading governments and universities to treat a sociological opinion survey and a drug evaluation study, as if they were all part of 'human subject research,' that can be evaluated by the same all-knowing REB, using criteria that may apply to medical treatment-evaluation studies, but that do not apply to most social science research."

3. Though the Tri-Council agreed to drop the term "code" (with its suggestion of mandatory rules), "it was made clear to REBs, that if a researcher did not follow the so-called "statement", the right to apply for funding would be denied, because the REB would refuse to accept the proposed research."

Furedy stresses that all of this is relatively new, but that new scholars may not understand that. He writes,

senior investigators are likely to be able get their research proposals through, even though they know, in their heart of hearts, the significance of distinctions such as the one between ethical and epistemological or research-design issues. But for younger researchers, and especially those who are currently students, the distinction between ethical and epistemological issues has been conflated, and so they lack a memory of how research used to be conducted. So researchers of the future are likely to succumb to the bioethics industry. They will, in the epistemological sense, be corrupted by these developments. Current senior researchers, then, who are in control to-day, are acting like France's Louis XV, who was said to have said "Après moi, le deluge."

As a historian, I applaud both the reference to the Bourbon monarchy and Furedy's emphasis on the need for historical consicousness. If younger researchers understand that scholars did not always operate under today's restrictive conditions, they are more likely to imagine alternatives.

Lisa Wynn's Words and Pictures

In April I commented on the ethics training program for ethnographers developed by Lisa Wynn of Macquarie University with some colleagues.

At Culture Matters, the blog of the Macquarie anthropology department, Wynn described the ideas that led her to develop the program.

Now, at Material World, a blog hosted by the the anthropology departments of University College London and New York University, Wynn describes another aspect of the training program: the pictures.

Wynn explains that along with its medical-centered ethics and jargon-laden text, the standard NIH ethics training program suffers from clip art in which people are depicted as faceless cartoons--probably not the best way to get researchers thinking about others as autonomous individuals. So for her program, Wynn offers pictures of real researchers and research participants, from Laud Humphreys to Afghan school administrators.

Gathering these photos--about a hundred in all--wasn't easy, but they contribute meaningfully to the warmth and depth of the site. And it put Wynn in touch with some prominent scholars.

[Side note: Professor John Stilgoe tells his students that it's rare to have enough photos of yourself at work. That's a good admonition; you never know when someone will want to show you doing controversial research.]

In another posting on Culture Matters, Wynn describes her continuing research on research ethics. She notes that ethics-committee oversight of ethnography is a relatively recent phenomenon. While it was debated as early as the mid-1960s, only in the 1990s did it become widespread. Thus, in studying the effect of ethics committees,

We’ve got a perfect “natural” control: an older generation of researchers who spent most of their careers not seeking ethics clearance, a younger generation for whom it is standard operating procedure, and a “middle-aged” group of researchers like myself who started their research under one regime and now live under another (I swear, this is the first time I’ve thought of myself as middle-aged). By correlating responses with different regulatory regimes, we can ask questions like: do researchers who never got ethics clearance have different ideas about what is ethical than researchers who go through ethics review? Does one group consider itself more or less ethical than the other? Or do they feel like ethics oversight hasn’t made any difference to their research practice?

Wynn plans to contact scholars in Australia and the United States to see how the spread of ethics review affected ideas about research ethics. I'm quite excited by this work; in fact, I plan to publish it in a special issue of the Journal of Policy History I am editing on the general topic of the history of human research ethics regulation.

How many pictures should I demand?

Macquarie's Innovative Ethics Training

In previous posts and my 2007 essay, "Ethical Training for Oral Historians," I have complained about standardized, medicine-centric ethics training systems like the CITI Program and called for training programs better tailored to individual disciplines.

Lisa Wynn of Macquarie University (also known as MQ) has alerted me to just such a program she created with Paul H. Mason and Kristina Everett. The online module, Human Research Ethics for the Social Sciences and Humanities, has some elements that I find inappropriate. Overall, however, it is vastly superior to the CITI Program and comparable ethics programs I have seen, and it deserves attention and emulation.

Maureen Fitzgerald's Ethics Project

Anthropologist and George Mason University alumna Maureen Fitzgerald, now affiliated with the University of Sydney, is the director of "An Analysis of Research Ethics and the Ethical Review Process as Culture and Cultural Process," an ongoing investigation more succinctly named "The Ethics Project."

Between 2001 and 2005 she and her associates observed the workings of 29 ethics committees in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States--not finding significant differences across national boundaries. They have published several papers based on this work, most of which are available on the project's website. Since the themes of many of these publications overlap, I will focus my comments on three articles that I found particularly helpful.

Macquarie's Respect for Expertise

A few weeks ago I critiqued "An inside-outsider’s view of Human Research Ethics Review," a blog post by Greg Downey of the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Australia. Downey complained in a follow-up comment that I had "singled [him] out on [my] blog for derision," an unfair charge, given the effort I have put into deriding a wide assortment of scholars and public officials. But he took the bait, and in two follow-up posts, Dr. Zachary Schrag on ethics, IRB & ethnography and Some practical notes on ethics applications, he explains some of the ethics review process at Macquarie. Together with the "Human Ethics" page of the Macquarie Research Office, these postings provide a glimpse at a system that cares more about research ethics than regulatory compliance.

Particularly striking is Downey's description of who reviews applications:

A kind of departmental review does take place within the university-wide committee at Macquarie, as members of the committee are clustered so that color-coded sub-groups do the preliminary and most serious review of applications for which they have special expertise. If an application has to go to the whole committee (for example, research with children, medical procedures, Aboriginal Australian groups, or ethically challenging research tends to), we usually turn to the members of our committee who are best versed in the area of study. If we have a particularly difficult ones, we’ll consult with a faculty member outside the committee who has special experience.

The key words here are "special expertise," "best versed in the area of study," and "special experience." Someone at Macquarie has decided that having a nutritionist review oral history, or an oral historian review nutrition experiments, is not in the best interest of researcher or subject, but that having knowledgeable people review applications might make everyone happy. I am particularly impressed that the experts do the preliminary review, which under the American regulatory framework (I'm not sure about Australia) would mean giving them the power to provide exemptions or expedited approval.

As I have noted in comments on his postings, Downey has yet to persuade me that even this level of expert review is necessary for projects by trained researchers that only involve survey, interview, and observation research, and I remain attracted to the University of Pennsylvania system, under which researchers are certified and then, largely, left alone. But I thank Downey for introducing me to a university that is thinking hard and creatively about ethical review.

Insider-Outsider-Down Under

David Hunter kindly alerted me to "An inside-outsider’s view of Human Research Ethics Review," posted on Culture Matters, a blog hosted by the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. The posting is anonymous, but the author describes himself "as a sitting member of Macquarie University’s review board for human research," which I think identifies him as Greg Downey. Alas, another failed attempt at keeping an informant anonymous.

Downey's [?] essay is a rebuttal to Jack Katz, "Ethical Escape Routes for Underground Ethnographers," American Ethnologist 33 (2006): 499-506. In that essay, Katz argues that protocol-review, the basic tool of ethics committees, is inappropriate for ethnographic fieldwork because fieldwork is so unpredictable. As Katz puts it

when researchers participate in naturally occurring social life and write field notes on what they observe, they often encounter people and behavior they cannot anticipate. Indeed, one of the strongest reasons for conducting participant-observation research is the view that the current state of knowledge, as shaped by fixed-design research that prespecifies the kind of people to be studied and the ways to study them (sampling designs, formalized questions and protocols, and time- and space-delimited situations in which to observe), is artificial, a product not of the subjects’ social lives but of prejudice.

He also notes that some ethnographers draw from past experiences and observations of everyday life, neither of which can be reviewed by an ethics committee. He then suggests ways that researchers and universities might escape the regulatory boundaries that seem to require prior review of research.

Downey [?] seeks to rebut this argument by insisting that prior review can improve the ethical content of anthropological research. He writes,

The ethics review process should not be avoided, escaped, or ‘exempted’ away. Rather, ethics review boards can be educated about ethnographic research methods and encouraged to produce clear standards for our research. I worry that too many anthropologists inadvertently suggest that ‘ethics’ is a bureaucratic hoop, that the ‘politics of representation’ is a far more worthy consideration than the nuts and bolts of evaluating risk, minimizing dangers to participants (including researchers), balancing public interest against risks that can’t be eliminated, and thinking hard about our relationships to our subjects, our collaborators, the field, the public at large, our home institutions, and those who support our work.

This is unresponsive to Katz's critique. If anthropologists lack "clear standards for our research," by all means they should develop them, with or without the help of scholars in other fields. But I don't see how ethics committees can contribute to this effort by demanding from researchers that they get "preauthorization for observations and interviews," as Katz puts it. That's just a demand for information that doesn't exist.

Downey [?] also writes,

Katz’s suggestion that decisions be made public—for many reasons—seems to me an excellent one, but that can happen on the departmental level even without university boards being involved. That is, each student need not invent the application anew every time. The goal is not vacuous or self-righteous ‘boilerplate language’ for ethics applications, as one recent anthropology blogger suggested, but a legitimate attempt by the anthropology community to think about effective techniques for recurring issues such as oral informed consent, naturalistic observation in heavily trafficked settings, the use of photographs, the protection of populations under dangerous regimes, and the ethical requirements on those learning of illegal activity.

OK, so we have some movement toward compromise and consensus. I would like to suggest that if Downey [?] believes that departments are the appropriate organs to publicize ethics-committe success stories, the first department to do so should be the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University. A listing of proposed ethnography projects and the improvements made to them by the Macquarie ethics committee could prove a model for researchers around the world.

Finally, I thank Downey [?] for drawing my attention to Australia's
National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research. This document is so shocking that I will save comments on it until I have more time.