Ethics committee evaluation protocols: a call for a more sensitive approach
‘What are you going to observe in the field?’
This question, when asked by an ethics committee evaluating an ethnographic research project may at first sight seem a legitimate one. Yet it might be just as legitimate for the researcher to reply ‘I don’t know.’ This response would reflect the fundamental nature, or the very essence of an ethnographic approach. Yet ethics committee members may find it unsatisfactory, which may lead them and the researcher into a vortex of debate and misunderstandings, ultimately resulting in a waste of time and energy, ending in frustration for all.
This example is actually based on my own experience in Canada with the ethics committee of my university, where, following several years’ academic experience in France and the US, I have been working since 2021. When I submitted my research project for approval by the ethics committee, I discovered what a cumbersome process it was. I think it would be useful to take stock of this experience, which went on for several months, and review the various factors that can lead to misunderstandings between researchers and ethics committee members.
An abundance of literature, mainly in the social sciences, especially since the 2000s, has questioned the relevance of ethics policies, procedures and protocols in North America and, to a lesser extent, in Europe. The list of issues raised by articles and conferences on this issue is too long to elaborate here in full[1]. However, a focus on conflicting temporalities of the institutionalized regulated ethics and the temporality of the actual research may help to clarify some of the issues.
It goes more or less without saying that a key feature of ethnography is its unpredictability, which may even upend researchers’ initial assumptions and end up completely redirecting their research. Observation, one of the main methods in ethnography, requires patience: accepting that nothing at all may actually happen during the observation and managing the anxiety this potential ‘nothingness’ may cause, while realising that observing a neighbourhood, a migrant association, a place of social interactions etc. over time may also frequently reveal what was not originally foreseen.
To observe a given environment effectively, a researcher often needs to build up relationships of trust with the people in it. Without that, it is hard, if not impossible, to fully grasp its complexity - in my case, for example, the complexity of migratory trajectories.
But the unpredictability of the field and the development of relationships of trust imply a long-term timeframe, one that sometimes begins before formal investigations start, and often extends beyond them. The internal ethic of researchers’ work, beyond formalised, institutionalised ethics with fixed rules and temporality, consists in establishing meaningful exchange with their interlocutors, during which it is not only a question of obtaining what we dryly call ‘data’ but also of helping them understand the reasons behind the research: the ethics of the research and researcher! (This can be more complex when it comes to studying the privileged social actors). Moreover, methods of anonymizing qualitative data have always existed in the social sciences and indeed, it is the responsibility of researchers to explain them to their interlocutors.
The objective of the consent forms ethics committees ask researchers to submit to their interlocutors for signature is also in part to inform participants about the nature and goals of a given research project. We might therefore think that researchers and ethics committees are seeking to achieve a similar objective, but as far as means are concerned, they diverge.
Let me give an example to illustrate my point.
In my previous research, I studied Iranian migrations in Dubai. I have remained in contact with many of the people I interviewed eight years ago. Recently, I met one of them informally for a drink, and she confided she was in fact from a stateless family. This fundamental fact in understanding a migratory trajectory, left unsaid eight years before in a formal interview, totally invalidated the story I had reproduced in my paper (this in itself serves as a lesson in humility for researchers!). When this person told me about her family’s statelessness, I mentioned a recent book on the subject. She was delighted to discover that this category of population was at last gaining visibility, and our exchange led to many long conversations with other members of her family, in which I also shared my own precarious situation when I arrived in France as an Iranian immigrant, and the problems I had encountered regarding papers. This discussion undeniably enriched my thoughts about the subject of my research.
Were I to use this story in a publication, it would be unthinkable to ask this person to sign any kind of consent document. It would wholly undermine our relationship of trust, when I had in any case communicated my research objectives to her by other means.
When we talk of ‘qualitative’ methods, it isn’t simply a matter of listing a series of classical qualitative survey tools; it also means emphasising the quality of human relations based on reciprocity, respect, confidence, propriety and making a genuine effort to achieve mutual understanding.
If we are to avoid widening the gap that already exists between researchers and ethics committees, it is up to researchers ourselves to emphasise this sensitivity as a fundamental principle of human interaction, in everyday life as in ethnographic research, and to incorporate it into exchanges between ethics committee members and researchers as well. This implies a radical change of perspective, via which the evaluator and the researcher first endeavour to understand each other, through interaction of sensitive quality, before any application of the standard, formal rules applied in current ethical procedures.
So, I would like to see the opening question posed by a member of the ethics committee rephrased as ‘Why are you observing?’, or, why not, as ‘who are you as a researcher?’.
[1] See for instance Lederman, Rena. “Ethics: Practices, Principles, and Comparative Perspectives.” In The Handbook of Sociocultural Anthropology. Routledge, 2013.
Amin is a Senior Research Associate, CERC in Migration and Integration, Toronto Metropolitan University
