Dear Pedro,

I can sympathize with the issues you raise about ethics and how it can be seen to distort practice in order to meet requirements that are not research requirements.

Sitting on the ethics side of the table, it is obvious that many researchers feel this way. They approach their applications with aggression as if the ethics committee was a board of inquisition. They hide things; they reduce their research; they constrain the kinds of evidence they want. They seem to predict that the ethics folks will not accept the norms of their research worlds.

What we find, when we can get passed this barrier of antagonism is that people see their ethics proposal as a demanding of proof of project. That is a proof that there is a problem, there is a method to attempt a solution, the method is rigorous and meets the expectations of the field, and there is the real possibility of an outcome that is of benefit to society.

So far I haven't mentioned humans (I'm on a committee that only deals with human research). That is, people seem to have problems that the ethics committee is actually questioning their research as an activity. The National Statement about Human Ethics in Australia says it is unethical to conduct research that does not meet the conditions I just outlined. 

Faced with the demand for proof of project, some researchers say that thanks to their ethics application they actually had to state clearly, for the first time, what they were trying to do. The clarity that this process brought to their research was very valuable. Over a period of time, some researchers come to see their ethics applications as a key moment in the designing of their project.

And, we frequently point out to researchers another side to the equation of benefit to society. For example, we say to them, why aren't you video-taping interviews and why are you saying you will destroy your data rather than find an archive that will  take your data and use it further. That is, we try to embellish their work to the benefit of all concerned. In so doing, we show them how to undertake these extended activities in an ethical way.

Another way of looking at this extending is to say that we offer insights in to the practices of other researchers that might not be common in all fields.

cheers

keith


 
>>> Pedro oliveira <[log in to unmask]> 06/16/11 10:37 AM >>> 
Dear Keith, 
 
Thank you for considerate reply. 
 
I am, regardless to say, familiar with ethical implications, even if these tend to be different across countries. I suppose my point is that, for example, in comparison to design, ethnography has become 'common practise' in design research, whether or not results are to be published. In clinical psychology practise, to my knowledge, there is no such thing as the equivalent of an ethnographically-based form of research. It is a shame, as we could use it to design better clinical psychology & mental healh services. There is some ethnography research in psychotherapy, none in clinical psychology as far as I am aware, even if 'participant-observation' is what we do everyday as clinicians. Not me though. I gave up on hearing depressing stories for a living around two years ago and I am still happy with my choice.  
 
Ethics is important, but I often fear that contemporary ethics, with its endless regulations, is promoting a form of conceiving research detached from everyday practice, or better said, is promoting a representation of everyday practise detached from research. I wonder to what degree this happens in design as well. Yet as this may leads to a discussion that is a bit of a tangent, considering what is in hand, I shall leave it like this for now. 
 
Thank you again for considerate reply. 
 
Best Regards, 
Pedro Oliveira


--- On Wed, 15/6/11, Keith Russell <[log in to unmask]> wrote: