Ethics Review Process

Sources of Difficulties

Some of the difficulties reside in the fact that policies related to research ethics—national in scope—are premised on biomedical research and inadvertently promote an epistemology that is in conflict with paradigms associated with qualitative research. Moreover, membership on (local/university) ethics committees is represented by disciplines that do not naturally gravitate toward qualitative research. These two distinct facets of the ethics review process present qualitative researchers with an abundance of obstacles in receiving approval for their work.

The other set of difficulties arises from the diversity of disciplines and the variety of methods employed by qualitative researchers. As a consequence, it is difficult to formulate a coherent, one-format approach to ethics review for qualitative research proposals. Some disciplines, such as nursing, stand far closer to the medical model of research, whereas other fields, such as adult education (which might use autobiographical narratives), are far removed from the biomedical model.

A third source of the problem involves communication and can be traced to power differentials between those who promulgate ethics codes inspired primarily by concerns in biomedicine and those who practice qualitative research. Qualitative researchers are required to articulate their distinctive approaches, strategies, and paradigms in a language familiar to the dominant positivist model of research. This articulation is made more problematic by the fact that qualitative research is diverse. There is no one voice. By way of analogy, it is comparable to the many diverse Indigenous tribes who must express their wishes with one voice.

Impact of Difficulties

No doubt, the diversity of approaches within qualitative research has meant that the impact of the ethics review process has been felt unequally by those disciplines. There is very little empirical research on this impact, although there are a number of published, usually personal, accounts of qualitative researchers. The Qualitative Analysis Conferences in Canada, for example, have seen a decline of subcultural research that is a natural home for qualitative research. Research ethics boards issue many cautions about doing research on vulnerable or marginal groups or on groups engaged in questionable illegal activities. Researchers perceive such cautions as obstacles. Also in Canada, field research has suffered a significant decline over the past [Page 281]10 years or so. In sociology alone, the proportion of master's theses using research participants dropped from 57% in 1995 to close to 42% in 2004. When one considers that the proportion of master's theses using fieldwork through 2002 averaged 21% per year, one notices an immense drop of such theses after the introduction of the national research ethics codes, with an annual average of 5.5%. In anthropology, Will van den Hoonaard and Anita Connolly also discovered that Canadian master's theses have increasingly come to rely on interviews, rather than fieldwork, as the sole data-gathering technique (47.9% in 2004). Disciplines relatively new to qualitative research do not see anything unusual in this trend. In conventional fieldwork, however, formal interviews were not a main component of research, although conversations, chats, and the like were more common at that time than they are now. No doubt, other pressures on students, such as time limitations on completing their degrees, have exacerbated this trend toward more simplified models of research, pushing field research to the back.

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