Informed Consent

Most professional and institutional, national, and international guidelines and ethical codes for research demand that, other than in exceptional circumstances, participants agree to research before it commences. That consent should be both informed and voluntary.

Ruth Faden and Tom Beauchamp argued that research participants need to understand that they are authorizing someone else to involve them in research and what they are authorizing. In most circumstances, researchers must provide potential participants with information about the purpose, methods, demands, risks, inconveniences, discomforts, and possible outcomes of the research, including whether and how the research results might be disseminated. What is going to happen to them and why? How long will the process take? What are the risks? What are the potential benefits? Who is funding the work?

In some cases, providing information to ensure informed consent may take considerable time and effort for both researchers and research participants. In other cases, it may be sufficient to provide potential participants with a list of their entitlements and a range of information they can request. Researchers are generally expected to record participants' agreement to take part.

In general, researchers must negotiate consent from all relevant people (as well as organizations, groups, and/or community elders), for all relevant matters, and (possibly) at all relevant times. Several researchers have argued that consent should be dynamic and continuous and not limited to the beginning of the research project. This point has been made particularly forcefully by anthropologists.

Faden and Beauchamp also depicted informed consent as an autonomous action committed intentionally with understanding and without controlling influences resulting either from coercion or manipulation by others or from psychiatric disorders. However, researchers may find it difficult to assess whether potential participants' circumstances allow them such freedom. In consequence, special procedures are often adopted when attempting to obtain consent or assent from vulnerable and dependent groups.

The complexities of informed consent have proved to be particularly problematic for qualitative researchers engaged in covert research or deception. Deception could compromise the informed and voluntary nature of consent, but some researchers have argued that consent need not be obtained where any harm caused by lack of consent might be outweighed by the public benefit obtained. In addition, it might be impossible to gain access to some participants if other people are not deceived. Qualitative researchers have also had difficulty with the ethics review process when [Page 432]institutionally standardized consent processes that mandate excessively formal information sheets or signed consent forms have been imposed. This might jeopardize the safety and autonomy of research participants, the quality of the research, and/or the integrity of the consent process itself.