Engaging with Different Ethical Regimes
The researcher’s ethical responsibilities are crucial for the integrity of every research project. However, ethical regimes engrained in a particular academic culture (or a lack thereof) shape the ways researchers practice their research-related work and consequently, how their entire research project is shaped. As an interdisciplinary social scientist who is trained as an ethnographer and has researched in the field of migration, integration, gender, health, and development in the Canadian, Danish, Norwegian, and Nepali universities, I have always prioritized my ethical duty of care, confidentiality, and privacy of all of my informants. Being an ethnographer, fieldwork has been an important data collection tool in all my research work. During the fieldwork, I always aim to move away from the conventional ethnography, which is mostly interpretive and tends to focus on what is going on in a particular setting. Instead, I approach fieldwork as a dynamic and relational arena where interactions between researcher and participants are often contested and entangled in networks of power relations. Consequently, ethical considerations have always become an important aspect of my work to ensure the rights and wellbeing of my participants and myself. Unlike in the Canadian universities, I did not have to be contingent upon the rigid and standardized ethics approval process in Denmark, Norway, and Nepal to conduct the research. So only after starting my research career in Canada in 2021, I experience how a standardized ethics regime with a particular ethics code could, albeit unintentionally, homogenize research projects and create mistrust between researchers and the ethics board.
So far, I have engaged in the ethics application process for a few projects in the Canadian universities, namely the University of Toronto Mississauga, Guelph University, and Ryerson University (re-naming in the process). Initially, I felt excited after hearing about the ethics application process in Canada despite the warning of my colleagues of the ethics clearance being a long tedious process. In the Norwegian and the Danish universities, I only had to submit a short information sheet about my projects to the respective ethics boards as my research topics were not considered as ‘sensitive’. For my Mphil degree in Norway, I had conducted ethnographic research on the roles of literacy programs to empower women learners in the squatter settlements of Kathmandu, Nepal. For my doctoral project in Denmark, I conducted interviews with highly educated migrants, settlement organizations, and employers and performed participant observation to examine highly skilled migration both as a social and political construct [i.e., national narratives on highly educated migrants] and as an empirical fact [i.e., migrants' subjective everyday experiences]. While I was studying for the master’s degree in Rural Development [Tribhuvan University, Nepal, 2006], there was no provision of the ethics clearance in Nepal and thus did not have to submit an ethics application.
As I conducted research on migrant and integration in the Canadian context, my enthusiasm that had sprung after reading the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS 2) soon turned into bewilderment as I began to think about how to ensure an equilibrium between the standardized ethics requirements, participants’ desire, and my research goal. I realized that not being tied up by the formal ethical regime in Denmark, Norway and Nepal had provided me a precious opportunity to embark upon the fieldwork with an open mind (and an open-ended interview guide). As I gradually became immersed in the field and began developing rapport and trust with the participants over time, I began to notice their aspirations, struggles, and issues that extended far beyond my initial research questions. Such experiences often led me to modify the research questions, and, in the hindsight, I am grateful for receiving that opportunity to shift the overall research aim.
From my experience so far, I believe that the research ethics regime in Canada needs to recognize that how the researcher enters the field not only affects their subsequent experiences in the field but also the entire research project and its societal benefits. In the majority of the social science, and in particular on immigration-related research, there is a need to consider each participant’s story as unique and each researcher’s interaction with each one of the participants as distinctive, and thus should not be standardized. The demand to detail the research design and data collection instruments prior to fieldwork, obligation to wait to conduct fieldwork before gaining ethics approval, and demand to apply for amendments in the case of every changes in research plans can curtail opportunities for the researcher to gather the thick descriptions from the field. The ethics review process should not be just a ‘formal’ process that researchers feel forced to engage in to conduct their research as it would turn the ethics review into a process that the researchers despise. There is a need for an open discussion on how the standardized ethics codes, initially developed for medical studies, could be amended for the researchers in social science and their work. Despite all the caution and preparedness stated in the ethics application, researchers have (and will continue to) experience ethical dilemmas, multi-layered complexities of their positionalities, and varied emotional roller coaster when they enter the field. Hence, researchers should be rigorously trained to embrace such dilemmas and emotions and to engage in self-reflexivity, which can contribute to re-vision issues of objectivity and researcher authority and recognize all knowledge as ‘situated knowledge’.
Ashika is a Research Fellow, CERC in Migration and Integration, Toronto Metropolitan University
