Will TCPS2 Improvements Reach Researchers?

Canadian oral historian Nancy Janovicek applauds the ways that TCPS2 improves over TPCS’s treatment of oral history, but she warns that historians still must devote time to bureaucratic strategy that might be better spent exploring ethics and interviewing narrators.

[Nancy Janovicek, ,“Oral History and Ethical Practice after TCPS2,” in The Canadian Oral History Reader, ed. Kristina R. Llewellyn, Alexander Freund, and Nolan Reilly (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2015), 73–97.]

TCPS Envy

How good is TCPS2, Canada's current framework of research regulation?

Martin Tolich, with co-authors, thinks it's pretty good. He suggests that at the very least, it can serve as a starting point for other countries interested in reforming their systems of research ethics oversight to make them more responsive to the concerns of social scientists and the people they study.

[Tolich, M, and BP Smith. “Evolving Ethics envy—New Zealand Sociologists Reading the Canadian Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans.” Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online 9, no. 1 (2014): 1–10. doi:10.1080/1177083X.2013.867513; Hoonaard, Will C. van den, and Martin Tolich. “The New Brunswick Declaration of Research Ethics: A Simple and Radical Perspective.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 39, no. 1 (March 31, 2014): 87 – 98]

After Lawsuit, Arizona State IRB Hindered Native American Interviews

Kimberly TallBear, assistant professor of science, technology, and environmental policy at Berkeley, describes her encounters with IRBs there and at Arizona State University. At the latter, the IRB imposed conditions that made her abandon plans to interview Native Americans.

["Interview with Kimberly TallBear," GeneWatch, May/June 2010.]

As she puts it:

IRBs vary from university to university, and some are much stricter than others. For example, the Arizona State University IRB is, after the Havasupai lawsuit, incredibly strict where tribes are concerned. If you're going to do research with native populations, whether it's biological research or even social science research, you have to get approval from the tribal council before the university will even look at your protocol. On the other hand, I'm doing a project at Berkeley where I'm interviewing both genetic scientists and tribal government people, and Berkeley didn't look twice at my interview with indigenous people. I asked if they require some sort of documentation that I got approval from the tribe, and they said, "No, no, no, that's not a problem." So there are differences between IRBs as well as between disciplines . . .

I'm not an expert on IRBs, but I can speak from personal experience—I have worked at both Arizona State and Berkeley, so I have seen the huge differences in IRBs. In short, the difference is that ASU has been sued. Before the Havasupai suit, ASU was lax as well.

I was at ASU in 2006 and 2007. As a social scientist, I was interviewing a range of people—native people, scientists, regulators—and the IRB was very strict about allowing me to talk to tribes. I had interviewees at five or six tribes, which meant I would have had to go through each one of those tribes to get approval for those interview questions. So, in order to get approval for my science piece, I backed out of the Native American community member questions.

This was also really interesting: I study the culture and politics of genetic science, and I think they should have been more strict and careful about my research questions for scientists. In my work, scientists are potentially vulnerable subjects. Now, I don't actually think they are very vulnerable—I think they actually have a lot more cultural authority than I do in the broader world—but I'm a potential critic. While the native populations were seen as potentially vulnerable subjects, it didn't seem to have crossed the IRB's minds that scientists could be potentially vulnerable subjects, too.

It was the opposite at Berkeley, actually: they were much, much more concerned about my questions for scientists and protecting their confidentiality, and they seemed not at all concerned about my questions for indigenous people, at least from my perspective.

TallBear does not appear angry that the the ASU IRB's strictness forced her to "back out" of planned interviews. Rather, she seems to wish that IRBs were even stricter: "What IRBs require is a bare minimum of the standards that you have to meet to conduct ethical research. IRB approval doesn't constitute a thorough process." And, later, "you see people who have just decided they don't want to work with tribes, because they don't want to have to go through a tribal research review board, they don't want to let a tribal council or a tribal IRB have a say over whether they can publish something or not. I think that's a good thing . . . Go do something else!"

It is not clear from the published interview whether she believes that such discouragement is appropriate only for geneticists and other biomedical researchers, or if she is happy to let tribal governments control the writings of social scientists and journalists as well.

Draft TCPS Allows Critical Inquiry of Aboriginal Governments

In 2006, Canadian historian Nancy Janovicek complained that ethics polices designed to protect Aboriginal peoples could allow Aboriginal governments to silence their critics by denying researchers permission to speak with them.

A new draft revised version of Chapter 9 of the Tri-Council Policy Statement addresses that problem. While it calls for researchers to secure the permission of Aboriginal governments for most types of research, it recognizes that this may be inappropriate when those governments themselves are being critically examined:

Article 9.7.   Research that critically examines the conduct of public institutions or persons in authority may do so ethically, notwithstanding the usual requirement, in research involving Aboriginal peoples, of engaging representative leaders.

As I have written before, the draft TCPS is inconsistent in its respect for critical inquiry, and ethics committees may not give sufficient weight to the disclaimers like this one. But such statements do give researchers a foothold in arguing for the freedom of inquiry.