Prelims

Half Title Page

Virtue Ethics in the Conduct and Governance of Social Science Research

Series Page

Advances in Research Ethics and Integrity

Series Editor: Dr Ron Iphofen FAcSS, Independent Consultant, France

Recent Volumes:

Series Page

Advances in Research Ethics and Integrity

Series Editor

Dr Ron Iphofen FAcSS, Independent Consultant, France

Editorial Advisory Group

• Professor Robert Dingwall FAcSS, Dingwall Enterprises Ltd and Nottingham Trent University, UK

• Dr Nathan Emmerich Institute of Ethics, Dublin City University & Queens University Belfast, UK

• Professor Mark Israel University of Western Australia, Australia

• Dr Janet Lewis AcSS, Former Research Director, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, UK

• Professor John Oates FAcSS, Open University, UK

• Associate Professor Martin Tolich University of Otago, New Zealand

Title Page

Advances in Research Ethics and Integrity Volume 3

Virtue Ethics in the Conduct and Governance of Social Science Research

Volume Editor

Nathan Emmerich

Institute of Ethics, Dublin City University & Queen’s University Belfast, UK

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2018

Copyright © 2018 Emerald Publishing Limited

Reprints and permissions service

Contact: booksandseries@emeraldinsight.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the text, illustrations or advertisements. The opinions expressed in these chapters are not necessarily those of the Editor or the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78714-608-2 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78714-607-5 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78714-993-9 (Epub)

ISSN: 2398-6018 (Series)

Contents

Notes on Contributors

Sarah Banks is Professor in the School of Applied Social Sciences and Co-director of the Centre for Social Justice and Community Action at Durham University, UK. She researches and teaches in the fields of community, youth and social work, with a particular interest in professional ethics, community development and participatory action research.

Helen Brown Coverdale is a Teaching Fellow in Political Theory at University College London. She holds an Arts & Humanities Research Council funded PhD in Law (London School of Economics) which applied the ethics of care to the theory of punishment. Helen is a legal and political theorist, and has taught political thought in the Philosophy Department at King’s College London and the Government Department at the London School of Economics.

David Carpenter works at the University of Portsmouth where he lectures in moral and political philosophy and researches in the broad field of research ethics. David is currently engaged as an ethics adviser to a DFID-funded project in South Asia. He is a long-standing Chair of an NHS Ethics Committee and regularly contributes to the work of the Health Research Authority in training and research projects. He was Vice Chair of the former Association for Research Ethics, which is now part of the Association for Research Managers and Administrators. He is a member of the British Psychological Society Ethics Committee.

John Elliott is Emeritus Professor of Education and Lifelong Learning at the University of East Anglia, UK and a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences. His most recent publications include ‘Reflecting Where the Action Is: The selected works of John Elliott’ (2007), and ‘Curriculum, Pedagogy and Educational Research: The Work of Lawrence Stenhouse’ (with Nigel Norris Eds 2012).

Rachel Forrester-Jones is Professor of Social Inclusion, and Director of the Tizard Centre, the leading UK academic group working in learning disability and community care, at the University of Kent. She has more than 170 publications and is the recipient of more than 45 research grants. Rachel is the founding director of a new Research Cluster for Applied Research Ethics and Integrity at Kent and is a recently qualified Barrister (NR) and chair of the Research Ethics and Governance Committee at Kent.

Martyn Hammersley is Emeritus Professor of Educational and Social Research at The Open University, UK. He has carried out research in the sociology of education and studied the role of the media in reporting research findings. He has written several books, including: Methodology, Who Needs It? (2011); What is Qualitative Research? (2012); (with Anna Traianou) Ethics in Qualitative Research (2012); and The Limits of Social Science (2014).

Richard Kwiatkowski is a Senior Lecturer in Organizational Psychology Development and Learning in the Cranfield School of Management at Cranfield University. He is a former Chair of the British Psychological Society’s Ethics Committee and Vice-Chair of the Cranfield University Ethics Committee. He is also a Chartered and Registered Occupational Psychologist and Counselling Psychologist.

Kath Melia is a sociologist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Edinburgh. Kath’s most recently published work is Ethics for Nursing and Healthcare Practice (2014). Her current interest is in the relationship between ethics, sociology and the law in the context of clinical practice.

Jason Z. Morris is an Associate Professor (currently chair) in the Department of Natural Sciences at Fordham University. He earned his Ph.D. in Genetics at Harvard Medical School. In addition to his work on the genetic regulation of Drosophila development and behavior, he has published ethics articles in The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy and Research Ethics.

Marilyn C Morris, MD, MPH is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Columbia University. Her research focuses on regulatory and ethical aspects of human subjects research. She is a past IRB chair and current IRB member at Columbia University Medical Center.

Nicole Palmer is Research Ethics and Governance Officer at the University of Kent and is currently pursuing a PhD in Research Ethics and Integrity at Kent. Nicole has responsibility for the University’s research ethics review processes, developing policy and procedure on good practice and misconduct. Nicole provides training, advice and guidance to staff and students. She is co-founding member of the Applied Research Ethics and Integrity Research Cluster in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent.

Anna Traianou is Reader in Educational Studies, in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has carried out research into the nature of teacher expertise and, in particular, the ways in which knowledge (including research knowledge) are implicated in policy-making and professional practice. Her publications include: Understanding Teacher Expertise in Primary Science: A Sociocultural Approach (2006) and Ethics in Qualitative Research: Controversies and Contexts (with Martyn Hammersley, 2012).

About the Series Editor

Dr Ron Iphofen, FAcSS, is Executive Editor of the Emerald book series Advances in Research Ethics and Integrity and edited volume 1 in the series, Finding Common Ground: Consensus in Research Ethics Across the Social Sciences (2017). He is an Independent Research Consultant, a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences, the Higher Education Academy and the Royal Society of Medicine. Since retiring as Director of Postgraduate Studies in the School of Healthcare Sciences, Bangor University, his major activity has been as an adviser to the European Commission (EC) on both the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) and Horizon 2020. His consultancy work has covered a range of research agencies (in government and independent) across Europe. He was Vice Chair of the UK Social Research Association and now convenes their Research Ethics Forum. He was scientific consultant on the EC RESPECT project – establishing pan-European standards in the social sciences. He has advised the UK Research Integrity Office; the National Disability Authority (NDA) of the Irish Ministry of Justice; and the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology among many others. Ron was founding Executive Editor of the Emerald gerontology journal Quality in Ageing and Older Adults. He published Ethical Decision Making in Social Research: A Practical Guide (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 and 2011) and coedited with Martin Tolich The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research Ethics (Sage, 2018).

About the Volume Editor

Nathan Emmerich is a research fellow in the Institute of Ethics, Dublin City University and a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of History, Anthropology, Politics and Philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast. His research falls under the broad rubric of Bioethics. He is mostly interested in using social theory to examine how morality and ethics are produced, reproduced and ‘done’ in various domains of medicine and healthcare including clinical practice, medical education, governance, management and academia.

Series Preface

This book series, Advances in Research Ethics and Integrity, grew out of foundational work with a group of Fellows of the UK Academy of Social Sciences (AcSS) who were all concerned to ensure that lessons learned from previous work were built upon and improved in the interests of the production of robust research practices of high quality. Duplication or unnecessary repetitions of earlier research and ignorance of existing work were seen as hindrances to research progress. Individual researchers, research professions and society all suffer in having to pay the costs in time, energy and money of delayed progress and superfluous repetitions. There is little excuse for failure to build on existing knowledge and practice given modern search technologies unless selfish ‘domain protectionism’ leads researchers to ignore existing work and seek credit for innovations already accomplished. Our concern was to aid well-motivated researchers to quickly discover existing progress made in ethical research in terms of topic, method and/or discipline and to move on with their own work more productively and to discover the best, most effective means to disseminate their own findings so that other researchers could, in turn, contribute to research progress.

It is true that there is a plethora of ethics codes and guidelines with researchers left to themselves to judge those more appropriate to their proposed activity. The same questions are repeatedly asked on discussion forums about how to proceed when similar longstanding problems in the field are being confronted afresh by novice researchers. Researchers and members of ethics review boards alike are faced with selecting the most appropriate codes or guidelines for their current purpose, eliding differences and similarities in a labyrinth of uncertainty. It is no wonder that novice researchers can despair in their search for guidance and experienced researchers may be tempted by the ‘checklist mentality’ that appears to characterise a meeting of formalized ethics ‘requirements’ and permit their conscience-free pursuit of a cherished programme of research.

If risks of harm to the public and to researchers are to be kept to a minimum and if professional standards in the conduct of scientific research are to be maintained, the more that fundamental understandings of ethical behaviour in research are shared the better. If progress is made in one sphere all gain from it being generally acknowledged and understood. If foundational work is conducted all gain from being able to build on and develop further that work.

Nor can it be assumed that formal ethics review committees are able to resolve the dilemmas or meet the challenges involved. Enough has been written about such review bodies to make their limitations clear. Crucially they cannot follow researchers into the field to monitor their every action, they cannot anticipate all of the emergent ethical dilemmas nor, even, follow through to the publication of findings. There is no adequate penalty for neglect through incompetence, nor worse, for conscious omissions of evidence. We have to rely upon the ‘virtues’ of the individual researcher alongside the skills of journal and grant reviewers. We need constantly to monitor scientific integrity at the corporate and at the individual level. These are issues of ‘quality’ as well as morality.

Within the research ethics field new problems, issues and concerns and new ways of collecting data continue to emerge regularly. This should not be surprising as social, economic and technological change necessitate constant re-evaluation of research conduct. Standard approaches to research ethics such as valid informed consent, inclusion/exclusion criteria, vulnerable subjects, and covert studies need to be reconsidered as developing social contexts and methodological innovation, interdisciplinary research and economic pressures pose new challenges to convention. Innovations in technology and method challenge our understanding of ‘the public’ and ‘the private’. Researchers need to think even more clearly about the balance of harm and benefit to their subjects, to themselves and to society. This series proposes to address such new and continuing challenges for both ethics committees and researchers in the field as they emerge. The concerns and interests are global and well recognised by researchers and commissioners alike around the world but with varying commitments at both the ‘procedural’ and the ‘practical’ levels. This series is designed to suggest realistic solutions to these challenges – this ‘practical’ angle is the USP for the series. Each volume will raise and address the key issues in the debates, but also strive to suggest ways forward that maintain the key ethical concerns of respect for human rights and dignity, while sustaining pragmatic guidance for future research developments. A series such as this aims to offer practical help and guidance in actual research engagements as well as meeting the often varied and challenging demands of research ethics review. The approach will not be one of abstract moral philosophy; instead it will seek to help researchers think through the potential harms and benefits of their work in the proposal stage and assist their reflection of the big ethical moments that they face in the field often when there may be no one to advise them in terms of their societal impact and acceptance.

While the research community can be highly imaginative both in the fields of study and methodological innovation, the structures of management and funding, and the pressure to publish to fulfil league table quotas can pressure researchers into errors of judgment that have personal and professional consequences. The series aims to adopt an approach that promotes good practice and sets principles, values and standards that serve as models to aid successful research outcomes. There is clear international appeal as commissioners and researchers alike share a vested interest in the global promotion of professional virtues that lead to the public acceptability of good research. In an increasingly global world in research terms, there is little point in applying too localized a morality, nor one that implies a solely Western hegemony of values. If standards ‘matter’, it seems evident that they should ‘matter’ to and for all. Only then can the growth of interdisciplinary and multi-national projects be accomplished effectively and with a shared concern for potential harms and benefits. While a diversity of experience and local interests is acknowledged, there are existing, proven models of good practice which can help research practitioners in emergent nations build their policies and processes to suit their own circumstances. We need to see that consensus positions effectively guide the work of scientists across the globe and secure minimal participant harm and maximum societal benefit – and, additionally, that instances of fraudulence, corruption and dishonesty in science decrease as a consequence.

Perhaps some forms of truly independent formal ethics scrutiny can help maintain the integrity of research professions in an era of enhanced concerns over data security, privacy and human rights legislation. But it is essential to guard against rigid conformity to what can become administrative procedures. The consistency we seek to assist researchers in understanding what constitutes ‘proper behaviour’ does not imply uniformity. Having principles does not lead inexorably to an adherence to principlism. Indeed, sincerely held principles can be in conflict in differing contexts. No one practice is necessarily the best approach in all circumstances. But if researchers are aware of the range of possible ways in which their work can be accomplished ethically and with integrity, they can be free to apply the approach that works or is necessary in their setting. Guides to ‘good’ ways of doing things should not be taken as the ‘only’ way of proceeding. A rigidity in outlook does no favours to methodological innovation, nor to the research subjects or participants that they are supposed to ‘protect’. If there were to be any principles that should be rigidly adhered to they should include flexibility, open-mindedness, the recognition of the range of challenging situations to be met in the field – principles that in essence amount to a sense of proportionality. And these principles should apply equally to researchers and ethics reviewers alike. To accomplish that requires ethics reviewers to think afresh about each new research proposal, to detach from pre-formed opinions and prejudices, while still learning from and applying the lessons of the past. Principles such as these must also apply to funding and commissioning agencies, to research institutions, and to professional associations and their learned societies. Our integrity as researchers demands that we recognise that the rights of our funders and research participants and/or ‘subjects’ are to be valued alongside our cherished research goals and seek to embody such principles in the research process from the outset. This series will strive to seek just how that might be accomplished in the best interests of all.

Ron Iphofen (Series Editor)