Finding Common Ground

Consensus in Research Ethics Across the Social Sciences

Ron Iphofen

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781787141315
• eBook ISBN: 9781787143098
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the past decade there has been growing national and international concern about the impact of systems for the management of research ethics in the social sciences. In particular these 'procedural bureaucracies' are seen as inappropriate to the ethical governance of social scientific research as they were designed around the challenges presented by biomedical research.

This volume addresses and debates these concerns and identifies areas of 'common ground', core ethics principles and areas of particular concern in research ethics across the social sciences.

This volume draws on proceedings and papers delivered at a Symposia series under the auspices of the UK Academy of Social Sciences (AcSS). This project aimed to advance the understanding and application of core ethics values to all aspects of social science research from inception and review through research design, data acquisition, analysis and management to dissemination and application, in collaboration with social science learned societies, research funders, higher education establishments, researchers and participants in research.

FINDING COMMON GROUND: CONSENSUS IN RESEARCH ETHICS ACROSS THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

ADVANCES IN RESEARCH ETHICS AND INTEGRITY

Series Editor: Ron Iphofen FAcSS

Independent Consultant, France

EDITORIAL ADVISORY GROUP

Robert Dingwall FAcSS

Dingwall Enterprises Ltd and Nottingham Trent University, UK

Nathan Emmerich

Queens University Belfast, UK

Mark Israel

University of Western Australia, Australia

Janet Lewis FAcSS

Joseph Rowntree Foundation, UK

John Oates FAcSS

Open University, UK

Martin Tolich

University of Otago, New Zealand

ADVANCES IN RESEARCH ETHICS AND INTEGRITY VOLUME 1

FINDING COMMON GROUND: CONSENSUS IN RESEARCH ETHICS ACROSS THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

EDITED BY

RON IPHOFEN FAcSS

Independent Consultant, France

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

Emerald Publishing Limited

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

First edition 2017

Copyright © 2017 Emerald Publishing Limited

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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

ISBN: 978-1-78714-131-5 (Print)

ISSN: 2398-6018 (Series)

ISBN: 978-1-78714-130-8 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78714-309-8 (Epub)

CONTENTS

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

BACKGROUND TO THE SERIES: ADVANCES IN RESEARCH ETHICS AND INTEGRITY

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME 1: GENERIC ETHICS PRINCIPLES IN SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

SECTION I
SEEKING CONSENSUS: RESEARCH ETHICS AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

CHAPTER 1 THE QUEST FOR GENERIC ETHICS PRINCIPLES IN SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH

David Carpenter

CHAPTER 2 COMMUNITARIAN PRINCIPLES THAT WILL INCREASE THE DAMAGE DONE BY ETHICAL REGULATION? A RESPONSE TO ‘THE QUEST FOR GENERIC ETHICS PRINCIPLES IN SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH’ BY DAVID CARPENTER

Martyn Hammersley

CHAPTER 3 EMBEDDED ETHICS AND RESEARCH INTEGRITY: A RESPONSE TO ‘THE QUEST FOR GENERIC ETHICS PRINCIPLES IN SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH’ BY DAVID CARPENTER

Sharon Macdonald

CHAPTER 4 RESPONSIBLE TO WHOM? OBLIGATIONS TO PARTICIPANTS AND SOCIETY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH

Matt Sleat

CHAPTER 5 RESEARCH AS A SOCIAL PRACTICE: A RESPONSE TO ‘RESPONSIBLE TO WHOM? OBLIGATIONS TO PARTICIPANTS AND SOCIETY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH’ BY MATT SLEAT

Rosemary Hunter

CHAPTER 6 WHY THE BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH ETHICS MODEL IS INAPPROPRIATE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES: A RESPONSE TO ‘RESPONSIBLE TO WHOM? OBLIGATIONS TO PARTICIPANTS AND SOCIETY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH’ BY MATT SLEAT

Kenneth M. Boyd

CHAPTER 7 ABOUT ‘OTHERING’ OURSELVES IN A SYSTEM WITH DISCREPANT VALUES: THE RESEARCH ETHICS REVIEW PROCESS TODAY

Will C. van den Hoonaard

CHAPTER 8 DEVELOPING STANDARDS FOR RESEARCH PRACTICE: SOME ISSUES FOR CONSIDERATION

James Parry

CHAPTER 9 THE CANADIAN EXPERIENCE: A RESPONSE TO ‘DEVELOPING STANDARDS FOR RESEARCH PRACTICE: SOME ISSUES FOR CONSIDERATION’ BY JAMES PARRY

Susan V. Zimmerman

CHAPTER 10 TOWARDS COMMON PRINCIPLES FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH ETHICS: A DISCUSSION DOCUMENT FOR THE ACADEMY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

Robert Dingwall, Ron Iphofen, Janet Lewis, John Oates and Nathan Emmerich

CHAPTER 11 REMAKING RESEARCH ETHICS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES: ANTHROPOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON A COLLABORATIVE PROCESS

Nathan Emmerich

SECTION II
THE INTERNATIONAL DIMENSION: INTERDISCIPLINARY ETHICS AND INTEGRITY

CHAPTER 12 THE ‘ETHICS RUPTURE’ AND THE NEW BRUNSWICK DECLARATION

Ron Iphofen

CHAPTER 13 THE RESPECT PROJECT IN THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF INTERNATIONAL PROFESSIONAL AND ETHICS GUIDELINES FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH

Meta Gorup

CHAPTER 14 THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND ETHICAL PROTOCOLS AND STANDARDS FOR RESEARCH IN SOCIAL SCIENCES TODAY

Gabi Lombardo

CHAPTER 15 THE ETHICAL ASSESSMENT OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION – A REFLECTION ON THE STATE OF THE ART (BASED ON FINDINGS OF THE SATORI PROJECT)

Philip Brey, Clare Shelley-Egan, Rowena Rodrigues and Philip Jansen

CHAPTER 16 SAFEGUARDING RESEARCH INTEGRITY IN EUROPE: AN OBJECT OF INCREASING LEGAL ATTENTION

Mihalis Kritikos

CHAPTER 17 ACHIEVING CONSENSUS IN RESEARCH ETHICS: AN INTERIM CONCLUSION AND SOME RECOMMENDATIONS

Ron Iphofen

INDEX

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Kenneth M. Boyd	University of Edinburgh, Biomedical Teaching Organisation, Medical School, Edinburgh, UK
Philip Brey	University of Twente, Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences, Enschede, The Netherlands
David Carpenter	Moral and Political Philosophy, SSHLS, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK
Robert Dingwall	Dingwall Enterprises Ltd., Nottingham, UK
Nathan Emmerich	School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK
Meta Gorup	Department of Sociology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
Martyn Hammersley	Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Rosemary Hunter	Queen Mary University of London, School of Law, Mile End Road, London, UK
Ron Iphofen	Marsais, France
Philip Jansen	University of Twente, Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences, Enschede, The Netherlands
Mihalis Kritikos	European Parliament, Brussels, Belgium
Janet Lewis	London, UK
Gabi Lombardo	Sciences Europe, Brussels, Belgium
Sharon Macdonald	Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institute of European Ethnology, Berlin, Germany
John Oates	Child and Youth Studies Research Group, Faculty of Education and Language Studies, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
James Parry	UK Research Integrity Office, Croydon, UK
Rowena Rodrigues	Trilateral Research Ltd., Crown House, London, UK
Clare Shelley-Egan	Work Research Institute, Oslo, Norway; Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Oslo, Norway
Matt Sleat	Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Will C. van den Hoonaard	Department of Sociology, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, Canada
Susan V. Zimmerman	Secretariat on Responsible Conduct of Research, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

BACKGROUND TO THE SERIES: ADVANCES IN RESEARCH ETHICS AND INTEGRITY

INTRODUCTION

In many respects the genesis of this series is the result of a personal mission. In research practice and publications I have held an ongoing concern, even frustration, about duplications of effort and the ‘reinvention of wheels’. Unnecessary repetitions of scholarly work, failure to recognise or even be aware of prior, foundational outputs, pre-existing knowledge or important breakthroughs undermine research progress (Iphofen, 2016a).

One could reasonably ask if anyone really suffers from such failures. Clearly the individual academic who conducted the original work ultimately suffers in not being seen to make a contribution to the advancement of knowledge. But that may not be noticed except by the few who have access to the relevant sources. Indeed a researcher who appeared to take little notice of the original work may also be seen not to have made a valid contribution if the prior work subsequently comes to light. That researcher’s contribution is doubly diminished by the priority of the previous work and by its having been ignored or neglected. The body of scientific knowledge also suffers in that progress is necessarily slowed by unnecessary duplication. And society suffers in having to pay the costs of delayed progress and superfluous repetitions. Such costs might include repeat funding for activities covering similar fields of study or, worse, the delay in applying research findings that can improve human lives. Note that I am not here criticising the rigorous replication of previous research findings in order to test their continuing validity. But such replication would need to be fully justified in terms of its ‘value’ to making progress in science or in awareness of changing social or physical contexts.

So why might previous work go unnoticed or ignored? In the past there were reasonable excuses. Prior to the creation of reliable online search facilities, the ‘machinery’ for searching was manual, text-based, inefficient and could not be comprehensive. Many older researchers can recall working in places like the old British Library reading room, leafing through reams of card indexes in oak drawers to guess from a book title whether it related to their concerns. At other times the easiest solution was to patrol the relevant sections in the library for the small number of journals in your chosen specialist area and ‘spine read’ the shelves for relevant books. Good reference librarians were essential. Although these tasks were laborious there was still the delight associated with the unexpected find – a book on a topic that surprised or, more often, sent one off course! Or as bibliographic work progressed in the 1970s there were the indexed abstracts, citation indexes, the British Humanities Index, or Keesing’s Archives summarising news stories and so on that proposed timesaving opportunities. By the 1990s it had become possible to consider a field most thoroughly researched if one covered all such material and then followed up all the references in the published works. Nevertheless one still had to first wade through the paper by hand and it was extremely time-consuming and considerably less fun than spine-searching.

These searches were based on skills, professionalism, some intuition and the occasional lucky break. Students were reliant upon the advice of supervisors and academics on colleagues to ensure that nothing was neglected. ‘Have you thought of … so and so’s work?’ Partly as a consequence of scholarly preferences and the imperfections and selective nature of human memory, that source could not be regarded as thoroughly exhaustive. It also privileged concentrations of scholars and their close networks. There were additional particular problems accessing grey literature – government, NGO and corporate publications that did not always make it into academic research world.

There are many other reasons why previous and even contemporary research developments might be overlooked. The exponential growth in both print and, later, online publications meant that it has become increasingly challenging to conduct reliably comprehensive literature reviews. Each academic, not only under the pressure of formal research assessment practices, but in order to advance their own career might choose to ‘not pay attention to’ the work of others that might undermine their own claim to originality. Although contested, Kuhn (1962) offered some insight into these institutional pressures when he wrote of the constraints of ‘paradigmatic closure’ and the resistance to new ideas in science. To be sympathetic, there can be nothing worse than developing an idea, researching a field as thoroughly as one could only to come across, at ‘too late’ a stage, a piece of work that produced the same or similar findings only a few years earlier. Nothing is more dispiriting than just before journal submission or even a PhD viva discovering prior work that argues a similar point. Does one go for a re-write and admit a diminution of originality? Or submit and pray the chosen esteemed referees have equally ‘missed’ the previous work?

To repeat: what we must seek to avoid are the frustrations that go with working at length on a topic only to discover that someone has already produced the definitive response to the problem. And the related frustration is to come across work conducted today that takes no account of well-publicised research delivered some years previously. In addition we must guard against the temptation to corrupt practices that many see as undermining scientific integrity. These include plagiarism, failures to acknowledge prior work, biased peer reviewing and, in effect, poorly conducted desk or secondary research. Of course there is nothing new about such discreditable activities. For example, Sutton (2014) offers evidence that Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace clearly plagiarised the earlier ideas of Patrick Matthew without acknowledgement and Darwin then used his elite connections to ensure that he would not be scooped by Wallace. And although no culpability could be attributed to Einstein, Arthur Eddington’s famous experiment that confirmed Einstein’s theory of relativity was manipulated in favour of Einstein when Eddington threw out 16 photographic plates (two-thirds of his data) that seemed to support Newton’s view over Einstein’s (see Waller, 2002, on both Darwin and Eddington).

So when entering a new field of endeavour, how do we find out all that has previously been achieved? That is, how do we build upon already existing developments, avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, and the continual ‘reinvention of the wheel’? How do we maintain standards in research and ensure that much promoted principle of ‘integrity’? The constructive way to make progress is to assess existing previous work and see what else can be done that is novel, but without losing sight of the valuable insights that have gone before. In fact, isn’t that something all novice students conducting research are told by their supervisors? Do the secondary, desk research first. Do the literature review. Make sure you know what is available before starting to devise your own programme. Indeed many scientists proclaim progress as being made when ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ – ironically given the points raised above, often Darwin and Einstein are held up as the more obvious examples. And such eminent figures are rarely forgotten in the history of scientific success however ‘flawed’ some of their work might be considered to be in retrospect (Waller, 2004). But most scientists are ‘jobbing’ researchers keen to progress ‘the field’ while ensuring their own job security. So when making a contribution to the field, how can these ‘ordinary’ researchers ensure that future contributors are aware of what has already been achieved so that they, too, can build upon existing knowledge? There has to be something of an obligation on all researchers to seek the best, most effective means to disseminat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Finding Common Ground: Consensus in Research Ethics Across the Social Sciences
• Section I Seeking Consensus: Research Ethics and The Social Sciences
• Section II The International Dimension: Interdisciplinary Ethics and Integrity
• Index