Research culture

Neelam Raina: Hello and welcome to Middlesex University Research podcast.

My name is Neelam Raina and I am the Director of Research at Middlesex University. At Middlesex University, we do many different types of research that has widespread impact on our students, on our academics, and the wider community outside. The ambition of our research is to transform lives, and we do that in many different ways.

These podcasts are recordings done at Middlesex University by colleagues here who will talk about their research, their ideas, why do we do research, how does it matter, and all kinds of issues in-between. So welcome to Middlesex University research podcast. Thank you for joining us.

Anastasia Christou: Greetings, welcome Lee. Thank you very much for having this conversation with me this afternoon. I am Anastasia Christou. I am Professor of Sociology and Social Justice here at Middlesex University, and today we are going to talk about ethics. Lee, please introduce yourself.

Lee Jerome: Hi, I'm Lee Jerome. I'm Professor of Children's Rights and Citizenship Education over in the Department of Education and Chair of the Ethics Committee and the HSCE faculty.

Anastasia Christou: Fantastic. Thank you very much. I want to go step by step through some processes. Let's start with the local one.

So, thinking about the basic process of applying for ethical approval at Middlesex. We all know that from a researcher perspective, we have to engage with the Middlesex Online Research Ethics platform, known as the MORE system. As we engage with the system, we have to start thinking about the research that we are doing. How do we recruit participants? Who are these participants? What are the implications in terms of the sensitivity of the data, the processes for generating that data? How will we obtain informed consent? We need to consider the issues of confidentiality, anonymity, and any other restrictions, as well as the right of participants who withdraw at any point - or within any time limits, if it's time specific. For example, when students at the undergraduate, master’s, or PhD level are writing up their data analysis and writing up their thesis or dissertation.

Above all, the grounding principle is to constantly reflect on participant wellbeing and doing no harm. We also need to interject the researcher wellbeing and protecting ourselves and others. But how about from an institutional perspective? What would you say, Lee, are some of the core principles?

Lee Jerome: I think that is a great opening summary of the principles from the perspective of the individual researcher. It is useful to think about what’s Middlesex - or any other university that hosts researchers - what are their interests in managing some kind of ethical process? Why isn't it entirely localised to the supervisory team? I think there are a couple of overwhelming reasons. One is that all universities have an interest in upholding general ethical standards around research and upholding the integrity of the research process. And ultimately, that's the job of Middlesex as an institution.

Secondly, it's one of Middlesex’s overwhelming interests to make sure that we don't put ourselves at unnecessary risk. Sometimes as an individual, we might be blind to that or slightly blasé about taking individual risks because we've got so much invested in the project itself that we are willing to do anything to bring it to fruition. But it is good to know that someone has our best interests at heart and is looking in a cool way, at what we are doing to protect ourselves and then managing the institutional risks.

Middlesex doesn't want to come a cropper and be seen to be sponsoring research, which is problematic in some deep and obviously predictable way, so they are looking out for their own institutional reputation. I think one of the really important principles from that institutional perspective is simply that none of us can go out in the field and start collecting or generating data with participants or partners without someone representing the institution giving us the green light.

Therefore, it’s not some huge disembodied, anonymous organisational decision maker. It's just us. It’s our community of peers and fellow researchers who are enlisted to represent the best interest of the organisation and to look out for us. I think it is useful to think about why Middlesex maintains these procedures, which can, from the outside seem quite bureaucratic, but ultimately are quite invested in looking after the people involved in the process - a process that is enacted just by us and our peers.

Anastasia Christou: That's really, really important Lee, thank you for highlighting that. I'm getting from your reflections that a duty of care is central and really important. I'm reflecting about the ethical reference points that researchers use, and when I think about those, I also see some kind of typologies – such as disciplinary framings, national when it comes to particular nation states, and their systems of scrutinising ethical review principles, and sometimes we collaborate with international partners. Can you give me some examples from your area and your disciplinary background? What do you convey to students and mentees when it comes to those key reference points?

Lee Jerome: I think most disciplines and professional areas have their own kind of mediating organisations or professional bodies that represent a kind of a settled community of practice, or at least some attempt to construct a framework within which the community can negotiate their own ethical norm.

For me, the starting point is always the British Educational Research Association who maintain a guidebook of research ethics for educationalists. It's a really useful practical handbook, which takes the broad principles like confidentiality, anonymity, free consent, informed consent and turns it into a set of practical questions and principles that we might apply in education.

It might lead us to consider the range of possibilities if you're working from early years up to university students. How do you apply informed consent? It's the same principle, but it looks very different when you're working with three-year-olds in a nursery setting compared to 33-year-olds in a university setting.

So how do you take those principles and apply them in different educational contexts? It's useful to know that a community of educational researchers has considered these ideas and digested them already and presented them back to us. Then there are other more specialist organisations. For us, places like the NSPCC and Barnardo's are particularly good for thinking about children, and particularly good for thinking about vulnerable children. I'm very interested in children's rights and using children's rights perspectives as another way to think about young people as participants, and to remind ourselves that they also have rights to participate and express themselves, as well as rights to be protected from potential harm.

It's thinking about the broad frameworks within our disciplinary areas and then thinking about the specialist publications or specialist frameworks that are useful for our particular projects. My sense is that all disciplinary areas have equivalents mediated through various professional bodies.

Anastasia Christou: I'm an interdisciplinary social scientist but I also work with the humanities and the arts, so I tend to refer to various associations like the British Sociological Association or the Royal Geographic Society.

Sometimes I look at the UK data service, but even GOV UK has publications on ethical codes for scientists and UKRI as well. In a lot of the blogs in some of the professional associations, one of the core concepts that is often reflected on is issues of power - how to maintain equity and try to mitigate and minimise that power imbalance in research.

I frequently, as both an insider and an outsider in the research that I do, and especially when I work with communities that could be seen as marginalised and vulnerable, push myself over the boundaries about thinking through my positionality and my sense of power. Also, at the same time, not obliterating the agency that some of these groups bring in as marginalised and excluded.

As traumatised as they might be in their experiences of let's say displacement, homelessness, ill health, or colonial dispossession and oppression, there's areas of liberatory research practices and ethical considerations that I also take into account and weave into my research. Some of my doctoral students, who are currently in the field doing research with some of these groups, are further reflecting on these issues.

I recall them having quite a challenging and important ethical review process where there were multiple stages of revisions, and that was really important for them to develop a nuanced understanding of power.

How about in your research or in your teaching area. Do you find power to be central in the ethical considerations that you give?

Lee Jerome: Absolutely. I think in education it's particularly important as people, especially sociologists, have started to reconceptualise the nature of childhood and think about the extent to which we recognise children's agency. One of the obvious central considerations is when we are doing research as adults and we are working with children; how do we think about that relationship? Is it just us calling the shots, us defining the project, us determining who will be participants and what we will talk about? Or is there a more open, cooperative form of negotiation that is more appropriate?

It's also thinking about a children's rights perspective. That, for me, is quite interesting in ethical terms because the younger the children - especially those of primary age down - we would always expect there to be an adult who is providing consent on behalf of the children. However, a children's rights perspective would encourage us to think about children as people who can give consent as well. That might be relatively informal. It might be assent. Still, we always have to be aware that they will have their own ability to determine how much they want to participate in. A rights perspective causes us to go back to square one: it's not as simple as saying, ‘Let's get ethical consent from an adult and then we'll ask the child’. If the child wants to participate and the adult chooses not to, then you have just denied them their right to participate and to express their opinions, which is an international right enshrined in Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. So what seems to be, from a bureaucratic perspective, quite straightforward, becomes ethically quite fraught and might involve a lot of toing and froing with the various participants to make sure that you haven't, in trying to build in protection, effectively created a veto.

The next element is that we tend to think of ourselves as the powerful people in these kinds of research relationships. Often, when researchers try to negotiate access to institutions, they are very quickly reminded that they can be simultaneously powerful in relation to children's relationships, but completely powerless in relation to other professionals.

We often spend a lot of time in ethical processes thinking about how we will try to rebalance the power relationship with children, and then maybe not invest very much time thinking about how easy it is for a head teacher to deny us access in the first place. So before we even get off the ground, the gatekeeper has thwarted our attempts to start research.

The last bit I often talk to students about is that, because it’s easy to imagine getting access to young people, there’s a tendency to default to assumptions about recruiting in the classroom. However, the minute we enter the classroom as an ally of the teacher, we have stepped into a set of prescribed powerful relationships.

If we then want to embark on a different kind of collaborative relationship with young people, we may have defeated our ambitions at the starting point. So it's just trying to bring ourselves to consciousness of what power norms exist when we step into these pre-existing spaces and, if we genuinely want a more collaborative relationship, we might have to work a bit harder at recruiting people outside of the classroom because that shortcut might undermine our attempts to build a different kind of relationship. 

Without building a consideration about power into our starting point, it is very difficult to imagine how we might realise some of our ambitions when we want to embark on educational research.

Anastasia Christou: That is incredibly illuminating because it makes me think about the ethical approval system as being not just a bureaucratic process, but beneficial for the researcher in conceiving, perceiving, shaping their relationship with the actual research design and linking ethics to methodological design.

Thinking about the entire execution, as well as pre-empting and resolving some difficult issues before even field work takes place. Thinking about putting themselves in the shoes of the participants and focusing on informed consent - what does it mean to actually give and withdraw that consent? At the same time, focusing on strengthening a research proposal and a research design when we streamline on the data. What data is necessary to respond to particular research questions? Are those research questions ethically focused, ethically shaped, and might they trigger any issues in the field? What do you think some of the benefits of this type of thinking would be for participants? I just reflected on the researchers, but are there any benefits of an ethical approval system for participants themselves?

Lee Jerome: Although that toing and froing might be quite time consuming and sometimes a bit frustrating because you want consent so that you can move on. The conversation you have with your reviewers is quite helpful because one of the concrete results you get from that is the ability to be a hundred percent clear with your participants when you do finally go into the field about exactly what you are asking them to consent to, exactly what you are going to do with their data and exactly what the harms might be and what steps you have taken to mitigate that so there are no surprises.

I think that is really important, especially when you are working with younger people and especially if you are working in settings where you are going in on a relatively limited time scale. You need to hit the ground running and making sure you have thought through all these possibilities is a really useful way to make sure that the consent you secure is fully informed.

That is very important from the participant's perspective, and it is also useful for us because someone who consents without being fully informed about all the possible ways in which this might proceed, is more likely to withdraw at some later date. So there is a kind of mutual benefit, and I think working with young people, it is also really important to be very clear on the restrictions you can offer them in terms of confidentiality and anonymity.

It is very important to get that right because you cannot stumble into field work and offer people confidentiality that you are not, in fact, empowered to observe in the practice because if a child discloses to you a threat to their wellbeing, then as a responsible adult, especially working in a school setting, you do have a positive duty to let someone know and you cannot stumble in not knowing what the limits are on that process, and you certainly cannot stumble in not knowing who it is you're going to alert.

Having all of that lined up in advance is really important for the participants and to put into practice that you are looking after their wellbeing. More fundamentally, it's a way to let people know that you are fully respecting them, their autonomy and their wellbeing by rehearsing these points in advance. It's also a nice way to let them know that you are approaching this in a responsible and professional manner, which is a good way of building a rapport with your participants.

Anastasia Christou: Speaking about the professional manner of the process, I am very much aware that you have long-term and extensive experience of overseeing some of these processes in informal committees in your Faculty of Health, Social Care, and Education. Can you give me some insights of that experience?

Lee Jerome: One of the things that struck me when I started working across the faculty is that, although we are grouped together because we are similar in some ways - we are all concerned with professional education, we train mental health workers, social workers, nurses, and teachers - there are very different regulatory systems and standards being applied. The first most obvious thing to be aware of is if you are doing research in the NHS, you are very likely to have to get dual approval within the NHS and within the university.

If you are working in schools, it is a very different perspective because there isn't really a formalised system within schools to gain ethical consent. It's just a locally negotiated process. Ordinarily, if you were a teacher, you could do any kind of research with your children if you are just doing it for your own interest or in the interest of evaluating an aspect of your provision.

However, if you are registered at Middlesex as part of some official course, you have to comply with Middlesex systems, and there are also different frameworks in place. A lot of the work we do is around professional education, and those frameworks are written very differently. So I am very struck that when I read the social work principles for mentoring, they are very attentive to power imbalances between a mentor and a mentee.

Therefore, if you are doing research in that field, you are already pushed to think about power imbalances, whereas the educational standards for exactly the comparable relationship between a mentor and a mentee don't mention power imbalances at all and carry on as though it was describing a perfectly neutral educational process.

It strikes me that different professions are more or less comfortable with talking about some of these ethical conundrums, and more or less formalised in the way that they try to build in the checks and balances and thinking about how we work across the faculty. It's quite an interesting starting point. We are just launching the faculty-wide ethics committee, and one of the interesting things we are looking forward to is how we learn across those professional boundaries.

When you engage in that kind of comparative thinking, it makes you realise that none of us has all the answers, and we all need to be aware of how other people approach the implementation of these ethical principles.

Anastasia Christou: That's a really significant point and it reminds me about making a full consideration of context. In some of the research that I do, as well as in wider international comparative research, the context is very, very important - especially when there are potential collaborative bids and proposals involving NGOs, other public authorities, or wider institutions, for example, public hospitals overseas, schools overseas, or participant observation in a particular location.

My students and I have generally focussed on UK principles, but we also make sure that local contexts are scrutinised, taken into consideration, and embedded within the proposal and the submission for research approval. How has your experience been in terms of education or other areas within your faculty?

Lee Jerome: One of the things I have become aware of is that where you are going to do your research has a great bearing on what you need to do in terms of ethical consent. Some of our students, and indeed some of the partners I work with overseas, can't do anything in education unless they get written consent from the National Ministry of Education.

Now, in an English perspective, if I wrote to the Minister of Education or the school's minister in the Department for Education, they would think I was completely crazy to ask them for permission because they are completely out of the loop. Some people have to go very high up the policymaking food chain to get consent, and they can't even approach a head teacher or a principal before they've got ministerial consent. Whereas here in England, everything is done at a very local level - you have to negotiate your way in. Sometimes those national processes, because presumably the ministry is then getting a lot of applications, just want to see the form you are going to put under the nose of your participants. So, it's just a one-page letter, and then you get agreement from the ministry to proceed.

Because our system is fully devolved, I have to fill out the eight-page online ethics form with 30 or 40 questions and multiple attachments, so someone can pour over the entire ethical rationale of the project - since we have more time to pay attention to individual projects. Context and location seem to make an enormous impact on the practicalities of this. If I am currently working on a project between Croatia and Canada, we are having those interesting conversations where we agree on the broad ethical protocols between us and then have to go off and write entirely separate, legally binding documents in each jurisdiction that do the best job of implementing those ideas in whatever practical ways we need for the bureaucratic burdens in those countries.

Anastasia Christou: That's really fascinating because geographies and histories matter very much to this process. It's been a really fascinating conversation Lee.

I am just going to wind down with one core question which is really important to us as academics. I know that both of us are also journal editors, research-active academics, and publish our own work, so I want to focus on ethical issues and publishing research. In my case, wider topics of social justice, and I know you edit a journal on citizenship education and social justice. There's a lot of contentious topics, and sometimes they don't even involve direct research with participants - it might be a film, an archive or social media. As an editor, and also as an author myself, I’ve seen challenges when it comes to ethical considerations, including the potential for severely damaging the reputation of the individual researcher, and potentially their institution, as well as issues of trust, credibility, and integrity in the type of work that’s being published.

We've seen retractions happen across several journals. What are some of the challenges or issues that have fallen under your radar as an author, as an editor, as a published scholar?

Lee Jerome: One of the benefits of editing is that you see so much material you wouldn't ordinarily see, and you learn a lot from the work that gets published, from the stuff that gets picked up by reviewers, and from the material that ultimately gets rejected.

Some things have become a bit clearer to me. The first is that we all have a collective responsibility for making sure that things don't get retracted, so we need to do our due diligence check and make sure that whatever we publish has met ethical standards. To me, that means more than just saying, “This research was granted ethical approval with code number ….. from our institution”, which some people try to write as one sentence.

I'm really interested to know what ethical considerations were built into your project from the outset, how you implemented them, and what your reflections are on how well that worked. It's about building in a bit more of a candid conversation about the practicalities of the ethics of your research - that's quite useful from an author’s perspective. That's not to say that this isn't still an area of contention, and it has struck me that I've learned the most from the most challenging case studies.

There's one case in particular that I recently had to refer to the legal advisors for the publishers who oversee my journal, and also send out for further review by people with professional expertise in ethics in this area. I've learned an awful lot from it, and we’ve had to engage in extended negotiations with the authors after the research was finished.

Those, in many ways, are the most interesting examples because they remind us that research ethics is a process of negotiation with our participants, and a large part of the justification is the value of the outcome.

One example I'm thinking of (there is a link to the webpage where this podcast is published) is a recently published article called Hidden and Manifested Authority Abuse: Sexual Misconduct of Female Arabs by Jewish Males in Israeli Academia. Just by telling you that title, you can understand how contentious – and how very important - this kind of research is. It made me engage afresh with different traditions of feminist research and think about the balance between using real-life testimony and constructing semi-fabricated stories, using the real-life testimony as a launch pad to ensure full anonymity is absolutely guaranteed beyond any question. In doing that, how far can you stray from the transcripts of your sessions, and how much of that needs to be negotiated with your participants?

I find those kinds of processes absolutely fascinating because they remind you that research is a process of negotiation and, ultimately, of justification - and, to some extent, the ends do justify the means. We need to think about the context, the purpose, the value of this work, how it represents participants and real-life experiences, and how much work the researcher might have to do to do justice to that and bring all those principles back into alignment.

It's been a great experience, but one that makes me even more depressed when people just try to write, I got ethical approval and here's the code number because I know it's a much richer process than that.

Anastasia Christou: Absolutely, I can't wait to read that article, and thank you for bringing it to our attention. You mentioned candid conversations. This has been an extraordinarily candid and constructive conversation. I want to thank you very much for your time. It's been fantastic to share experience, thoughts and reflections on ethical issues in our own work, but also institutionally in terms of practices and processes. Thank you very much, Lee.

Lee Jerome: Thank you, Anastasia. It has been great to reflect on these issues with you.

Neelam Raina: Thank you very much for joining us for this podcast. This is a series of podcasts you have been listening to from Middlesex University, exploring the research we do here.

You can find us on whichever platform you get your podcast from, and you can also find us on the research pages of Middlesex University, which is www.mdx.ac.uk/research.

All of our podcast episodes will be posted here for you to access for free.

Thank you very much for joining us.

Goodbye.