Accountability in Social Research: Issues and Debates
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Certain issues continue to relate to the context in which Palestinians live; electricity and water are cited as major issues in the Gaza Strip, reflecting the poor provision of government services in this region. Regional differences in the issues of concern must be considered in programme topic selection. Increased inclusion of the Gaza strip in programming should ensure that the programmes remain, and are perceived to be, relevant to all audiences. The growth of social media use, and its continued use in programming, provides important opportunities to engage with diverse audiences and provide an additional platform for freedom of expression.
Promoting accountability through debate in the Palestinian Territories. June The Palestinian Debates were launched in September and are broadcast through both traditional TV and radio and social media platforms to fully engage the largest possible audience and encourage audience interaction. Research approach Building on research from , BBC Media Action conducted a nationally representative survey of 1, Palestinians aged 15 and over in September Key findings Overall, audiences report that the programmes provide trustworthy, unbiased and useful information. The programmes reach more men than women.
The programmes reach the target audiences of youth and young adults aged 15 to 34 years. So far these include local elections, immigration, youth, gender issues, education, juvenile and tribal justice, and the peace process, among others. The Israeli occupation has increased in importance as a national issue of concern for Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza since we first surveyed in Palestinians in the West Bank reported more often that they understood the discussion and reports in the programmes, suggesting that the programmes are more relevant in the West Bank than in Gaza.
Economic and Social Issues in Agricultural Biotechnology. They provide Palestinians with the opportunity to question decision-makers face-to-face. Accountability in social research: Accountability in Social Research: There is thus a secure empirical foundation on which science can rest. People could not live by the decision to redefine reality as something that is simply a construction of social discourse, with no independent existence. The debate that is set up in the first two chapters forms the background to the elaboration and development in Chapter 3 of constructivist argumentation in relation to the question of how accounts as set forth by researchers should be treated by colleagues, participants, and other audiences.
There are some regional differences, with fewer audience members in Gaza compared to the West Bank reporting that Palestinian Debates feature people similar to them in discussion and reports. Implications and impact Findings from the data show that the Palestinian Debates are playing an important role in providing a platform for direct engagement between Palestinian citizens and decision-makers. Search the site Can't find what you need?
These contributions show that research ethics is not something coming to us from out there, in a process of immaculate conception of objective ideals, but that it is deeply bound up with issues of power, knowledge, agency, individual and collective identity, and control, to name but a few. Such issues also come to the fore when researchers attempt to receive approval from the relevant institutional research ethics board for a planned study.
I became involved in formal, institutionalized processes of research ethics following a somewhat heated debate between members of the Faculty of Education and the chair of the Human Research Ethics Committee HREC at the University of Victoria. The point of contention was an apparent lack of understanding of educational research in the decision-making process of HREC.
My contribution and those of other faculty members joining the committee was to produce reviews and recommendations to the researchers that were more sensitive to the context in which educational research was conducted. Despite the representation of the Faculty of Education through our membership, the complaints from graduate students and faculty members did not abate, and perhaps, even increased. As such, I was responsible for all applications that came from the Faculty of Education. I came to realize that the most unreasonable comments about the potential risks of a study came from those that represented the education faculty.
Accountability in Social Research Issues and Debates
More so, many of the HREC members never have conducted research involving human beings, let alone qualitative research in general, and classroom research in particular. Prior to my tenure as the chair and again now after my tenure , researchers did not receive approval for their studies unless they responded to a growing list of what to do in this or that contingency.
In this book I have concentrated on drawing attention to various conceptions of accountability that might be brought to bear in judging the practice of social. The book considers issues relating to accountability in social research by juxtaposing seven ways of approaching the issues and by moving toward the.
For example, researchers were asked to articulate what they would do if a person who had not signed a consent form were to walk in the background through the camera field of vision—such requests for responses were imposed even though the researcher had noted that "no data will be used unless ethics approval has been provided by those who appear in them.
Having done more than a decade of classroom research, I selectively chose from the reviewer comments those that I felt were concerns that needed to be addressed and weeded out others that appeared to be part of the inherently innumerable i. I felt and enacted a responsibility not only to HREC, but also to the researchers involved and the participants that they intended to invite and include in the study. I know, however, that other chairs of the committee simply compile d a list of reviewer comments without making a decision whether they were reasonable or in fact represented an oversight of information already provided.
These chairs acted as if they were not accountable for their actions, sending laundry lists of changes to be made by applicants without assuring some kind of consistency from one application to the next.
Three contributions highlight the potential dangers of ethics and ethical review that arise for researchers that come with institutionalization. Robert ANTHONY describes the nightmarish situation in which two nearly identical, complementary, and parallel studies have been evaluated very differently—one was approved after minor changes had been made, the other was associated with a long list of changes.
To aggravate the situation, the chair of the research ethics board did not seem to feel responsible or accountable for the very different decisions she sent to the applicants.
More so, she suggested to review both studies and to disallow them. Such a situation cannot be taken lightly, for, as I suggest in my own contribution, it leads to arbitrariness, power, and institutional control inconsistent with the democratic values of our nation and the scholarly communities in which we participate. Linda COUPAL deepens the considerations ANTHONY articulates with her thoughtful theoretical analysis of issues involved in action research, where, as pointed out, the practitioner-researcher can find herself in the double relations of ethics and power of two interacting systems, the university and the workplace here school system, school.
Perhaps drawing on autobiographical experiences, the author exemplifies some of the issues through the character of practitioner-researcher Veronica. The protagonist initially was prohibited to conduct research within her organization on race relations, but her study concerning a gender-based analysis was approved. When her research identified a situation of sexual harassment, the organization and the university conspired to disallow continuation of her research. I can attest that a case like this happened during my tenure as HREC co-chair, but I am unfamiliar with the details of the case because the other co-chair had to deal with the situation.
Veronica found herself caught in the ethics-power connection that emerges within different interacting institutions. COUPAL provides a clear analysis of the ethical, moral, and political tensions within which practitioner-researchers operate in such a situation. My own contribution ROTH, b begins with the problem of reporting on institutional practices from the inside, a phenomenon referred to as whistle blowing. Writing about problematic issues related to ethics reviews and institutional research ethics boards potentially comes with annoyances, which range from silencing by gagging clauses e.
Such silencing may occur, although the courts ruled—e. The authors further argue that "an organization that forgets its mission has ceased to exist" p. A3 when it values loyalty over moral principle in its search for control. COUPAL's contribution illustrates what can happen to research when it uncovers and describes situations that are damaging to an organization: All researchers open themselves up to retribution when the blow the whistle on incomprehensible practices, for example, when the chair of an ethics committee insinuates that a proposal may not be granted approval see ROTH, b.
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Ethics in human research constitutes a potential mine field. Practices possible only yesterday may no longer be acceptable tomorrow—though there are researchers who defend Harry WOLCOTT and his sexual relationship with a research participant, I doubt that a research proposal would pass today if the possibility for such a relationship were to be articulated. Even if it is not articulated, the current drive toward introducing institutional supervision of studies by research ethics boards will certainly lead to the increasing requests for demonstrations of public accountability.
Accountability in Social Research: Issues and Debates
The present contributions show that phenomena postmodern, feminist, and critical scholars articulated in other contexts are also relevant to ethics and ethical review. Thus, rather than referring to some ethereal standards given to humans by some divine entity, the terms "ethics" and "ethical review" denote social practices that are as contingent and socially constructed as the scientific research process itself, a fact that we have come to be familiar with following recent work in science studies e.
Therein lie both their weaknesses and their strengths. On the one hand, the weaknesses arise from the fact that they are socially constructed and contingent, ethics and ethical review could be otherwise. There is no standard outside academic society that we can draw on for stating why they are this rather than some other way.
On the other hand, their strengths arise from the fact that they are contingent and socially constructed, because this gives us the hope for and allows us to rethink changes in the way we enact ethics and ethics reviews. It is in this spirit of thinking about, rethinking, and changing ethics and ethical issues that I call for contributions to this debate. These contributions may represent the different perspectives of different stakeholders in qualitative research—applicants and assessors in ethical review processes, graduate students writing theses and their supervisors, students and teachers, administrators overseeing the ethical review boards in their institutions, and so forth—I welcome all of them as authors.
The contributions may represent a broad range of issues but will focus on research ethics as their central theme, which we may come to better understand through its interactions with other themes, such as the issues of power and knowledge addressed by the contributors to this issue. I envision and call for contributions to the topics of ethical issues in research involving previously marginalized populations of researchers and participants alike with boundaries having occurred along the lines of gender, race, culture, socio-economic status, language, age, and many other categories of social life.
I am also interested in reading analyses of the institutional processes that deal with ethics and ethics applications, especially when this institutionalization has introduced idiosyncrasy and arbitrariness into play and when research ethics is used to stabilize hierarchical structures in universities and other places. That is, I welcome any piece that shows how ethics and ethics review are social practices that cannot be analyzed by getting into the heads of individuals, but that require careful social, cultural, and historical analyses.
As to the form of the contributions, I welcome any relevant genre in which the ethical issues in qualitative research are approached. It may be a first-person account, for example, of the difficulties to get an action research project through ethics review; it may be a third-person, for example, to articulate a theory-based analysis of the ethics review process; or it may be a mixture of the two—similar to the kind of analysis I used in to deconstruct decisions in our Canadian funding institution ROTH, I can envision letters to the editor on ethics issues, or responses to previously published pieces, lending support or critically reflecting their contents.
I can envision multi-column texts where the two texts present alternative perspectives and may stand in a dialectical relationship e. I welcome any contributions but would like to work towards addressing pressing issues in a thematic way, beginning with clusters of contributions focusing on qualitative research a in urban settings, b where gender is salient, and c involving members of aboriginal peoples and First Nations.
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Contributions to an historical science of the subject pp.
The manufacture of knowledge: An essay on the constructivist and contextual nature of science. Research Ethics and Practitioners: The perils of whistle-blowing. Public Works and Government Services Canada Ethical conduct for research involving humans. Roth, Wolff-Michael , May.
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The politics and rhetoric of conversation and discourse analysis. Review Essay [21 paragraphs]. Roth, Wolff-Michael , September. Evaluation and adjudication of research proposals: