Research Ethics
I have had to go through the research ethics process a few times, once at the National University of Singapore while I was doing my Ph.D., once at Georgetown University while I was a visiting scholar and thrice at Ryerson University as a senior research associate at CERC Migration. I cannot say I enjoy the process.
The research ethics process is an important step and is required by universities to ensure the protection of research participants, researchers, the university and the public. The process can be lengthy, involving attention to every minute detail of the research that is planned but it is usually also a process that forces you, the researcher, to really take a step back and plan ahead each component of the research.
However, many researchers find the ethics process to be tedious, time consuming and frustrating. One issue is that there is not much clarity on what is expected. There is a technical language that is expected in the documents you submit but even with samples provided, there is definitely a learning curve. For most of us, we go to our Ph.D. seniors or colleagues at work who have gone through the process and are kind enough to share their documents with us.
Once you submit your application, there is a wait time for 5-6 weeks and each re-submission takes another 2 weeks or so (for Ryerson University). Each response you get from the Research Ethics Board (REB) generally requires substantial work in answering their comments and questions. For a recent application, I had about 45 individual questions and comments after my first submission and got another 17 questions the next time around. Something I have found curious is that different people review your application each time you re-submit it so you could get a completely different set of questions the next time around.
I recently learned that when you are awarded a SSHRC grant, the start date can sometimes be immediate from when you receive that email (For my case, I got an email on June 18th but the official start date was June 1). While you can start planning the research, actual research with human subjects cannot begin before it is reviewed and approved by the ethics board. So it has been a time consuming process to work with my research partners in Nepal, get all the documents in order, then to translate them to Nepali as required by the REB before submission. This preparation and wait times means that your project starts off quite delayed leaving your partners on the ground waiting and wondering about the timeline. By the time you can actually start your new project, the excitement is considerably subdued.
Lastly, I have found it increasingly frustrating that the ethics reviewers do not always consider or comprehend the practicalities of working in a developing country. For example, finding research participants from rural parts of Nepal is not an easy task so we were going to work with local civil society organizations (CSOs), who would ask if returnee migrant workers would be willing to interview with us. If they agreed to it, the CSOs would share their phone number with our local partner organization in Nepal who would then call and confirm of their agreement before setting a time for the interview. The REB asked us to minimize any undue influence of the CSOs so we had to come up with another approach, which is to ask the participants to call our local partner office if they agree to be interviewed. In reality, this would result in very few people calling us. This approach wouldn’t work in Canada either, how many of us would call back a number to agree to be interviewed?
A colleague working with cross-border migrants in Nigeria was stunned at the questions she received regarding COVID-19 protocols. The REB asked her about screening participants for their COVID-19 vaccinations status, potential safe shut down procedures, equipment and cleaning protocols and of shared surfaces. While safety measure regarding COVID-19 are very important, this is a lot to ask when someone is interviewing migrant workers from West African countries who cross the border regularly to work in Nigeria, not the mention the very unequal access to vaccines in the global South.
One way we can ensure that there is better understanding of the social and geographical context in which research takes place, especially in developing countries, is to include people with research experience in the global South in the review team. I have found that ethics administrators are sometimes so involved in the minute details that they miss the bigger picture of the research and the purpose of it.
The ethics process is such an imperative process for all research, requiring us to properly plan our research but also to think about important issues such as consent, partnerships, working relationships and power dynamics. But the absolute frustration researchers share of the process show that Universities need to rethink the process, streamline it and provide support and guidance to researchers.
Richa is a Senior Research Associate, CERC in Migration and Integration, Toronto Metropolitan University.
