Title: Research ethics
Course: EDPS0009: Researching Education and Society: Qualitative Methods 2020/2021 > Section: 2. Ethics

What is ethics

Ethical considerations

Reading through the introductory materials, and having considered some ethical concerns in the seminar, it will have become clear that research ethics is not only an important matter, but also quite a vast one.

In this video [4:01] different researchers talk about some ethical issues they know arise in research, such as anonymity, confidentiality, formality and informality of conversations, sensitive topics:

These issues are of course all matters for us to consider when we plan a research project. However, these particular considerations reflect our particular world-view that is quite Anglo-Western-European centered. In our current societal environment, there is a recognition that our views may not be the only ones nor the best ones, and so more work is being done regarding different ethical paradigms, as we will see in Chapter 4 of this booklet.

For now, reflect on the different issues mentioned in the video and think about what the concerns could be, and how you could mitigate those concerns in your own research project.

Ethics processes

In this section, we will focus on the ethics processes at UCL and UCL IOE. The processes that we comply with at UCL are quite typical examples of research ethics processes across the Anglo-Western-European centered countries.

Have a look at these specific pages from the UCL websites and answer the questions below:

Research Ethics at UCL

Ethics applications: IOE staff

Accepted Ethical Standards

Exemptions

Research with children

The practicalities of ethics committees are different from one institution to the next, but the basic principles are the same: staff members will be required to apply to an Institutional Review Board or Ethics Committee to gain approval to carry out their proposed research. There are specific kinds of questions that need to be answered around how the researchers will carry out the research and why, but also what they will do with the collected data, where they will store that and how long for.

The process may be quite lengthy, if there are difficult situations predicted and it is not uncommon for researchers to revise and resubmit their ethics forms several times before full approval is granted. This is in itself not problematic at all. The only concern is that you cannot start collecting your data unless you have a relevant ethics number. Going backwards and forwards to gain ethics approval could therefore significantly delay the start of fieldwork.

For students, the research ethics process is similar, although not at the level of an institutional ethics committee or review board.

These procedures and processes are all well-established within UCL IOE, but also across all institutions in the UK and indeed in institutions all over the world. However, research is not only carried out by academics who are affiliated with universities. Teachers in classrooms carry out their own research to inform their teaching, and academics may work as independent scholars and consultants.

Here is a blog post from independent researcher Dr Helen Kara covering this eventuality of a researcher not being affiliated and therefore not having an ethics committee to ask for permission.

Examples of ethics codes

In order for ethical committees to be able to decide whether or not they grant approval for individual applications, the committee members need a set of criteria and regulations against which to judge the ethics of a proposal. These criteria and regulations are usually written in ethics codes. Each institution, organisation or association could potentially have their very own set of criteria and particular ethics code.

However, there are some ethics codes that are more commonly in use and referred to. Within the context of educational research in the UK the BERA Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research are the gold standard. BERA is the acronym for the British Educational Research Association.  In the United States of America, the American Educational Research Association AERA is the equivalent to the UK's BERA, and they also have their own version of ethics guidelines. There are many other examples around the world, but as you will be carrying out your research project within the context of the UCL IOE, we will focus on the BERA guidelines for now.

Please, do download the copy, as you will be using the guidelines quite regularly from now on.

Also, you may need to use the guidelines to be able to answer the questions in the BERA guidelines self-assessment task.

Different kinds of ethics processes

As has been mentioned already, our view of ethics is one particular view of research ethics: an Anglo-Western-Euro centred paradigm. But this is not the only way of considering ethics. And this series of 3 videos by Dr Helen Kara sets this Euro-Western view alongside Indigenous ethics.

The following image shows a concise summary of what Dr Helen Kara talks about, when she highlights how being an ethical research is perhaps not as straight forward or easy as many may think.