Dr Jo Rose, Associate Professor in the School of Education, talks to us about why it is so important for us to help our students develop an ethical mindset.
What brought the need for more support around ethical research to your attention?
A couple of years ago I became aware of a few PGT students who had carried out and submitted dissertations without ethical approval. This wasn’t because their school hadn’t prompted them – they had just decided to conduct the research without the approval. Then there were other students who conducted research which didn’t align with the approval they had been granted, by collecting data using inappropriate questions or methods. Clearly this was problematic! So firstly we had to negotiate what to do with those particular dissertations. But as a result of this I then started thinking about how we could stop it from happening in the first place.
I set up discussions with Faculty Education Directors and colleagues from other Schools and the conclusion I came to was that even when there is a policy in place you can’t physically stop this kind of thing happening. The challenge was going to be how to get students to think ethically, to understand the importance of ethical research practices, and to stop seeing the approval as a hurdle they can overcome in order to get on with the more interesting stuff.
The first issue is that PGT students are only here for just over 12 months, and have usually only been here for around six months when they start to think about their dissertations. This isn’t very long to immerse themselves in their discipline, plus most of them have a full curriculum and there’s very little time to be thinking specifically about ethics.
The second issue (certainly from the perspective of somebody from Social Sciences and Law) is that a huge number of our PGT students are from international backgrounds. Very often, English is their second language and this can present a challenge in itself – but there are also potentially big cultural differences around the expectations and understanding of what ethical research actually is. So, even for a student who is very comfortable with the English language they may be used to different standards when it comes to ethical research practice.
We also have to understand the context we are working in which is, rightly or wrongly, more and more risk averse. The requirements for getting approval are increasingly burdensome and take a lot of time for students. Conversely there is limited amount of teaching time to think about the requirements and we risk ethics becoming a tick-box exercise: this is something I was really keen to overcome.
What steps did you take to deal with the problem?
I was interested in finding out how people from different disciplines approach ethics, so in the summer of 2022 I ran a workshop to find out what was going on across the University. Staff from the School of Education seemed to already be thinking quite deeply about ethics and part of their process is for every research – staff or student – to have a conversation with a peer about the ethical implications of their research, even before applying for approval. At the other end of the spectrum there could be people from (for example) maths asking what has ethics got to do with us? It’s perhaps not something traditionally considered part of that subject, however there are people already thinking about the longer-term impact of what they do, for example predictions from data modelling, or working with big data and the impact on individuals as to how that data is used.
I also spoke to Liam McKervey, Research Ethics & Integrity Manager, and discovered there were some interesting pockets of work going on in Bristol, but I felt we needed to undertake a literature review to see what practice was going on beyond the University. We discovered that there is very little literature out there about teaching research ethics at PGT level even though we had reviewed a wide range of journals. So, with support from Marcus Munafo we managed to submit an application for some research culture funding – we had little more than 24 hours to turn it around and then waited two months to hear that it had been granted! But that gave us the opportunity to run focus groups with colleagues in Bristol and also to interview people at other universities. We were also able to recruit a Research Associate who had previously worked in medical ethics, which brought an interesting perspective to the project as she had more experience of regulatory ethics whereas we had been previously looking more at relational ethics.
From the interviews and focus groups we established the broad principles of the guidance – things that people already do, values they work with, how they meet challenges. We then had to distil that information with the literature review and carry out an analysis which enabled us to draft the guidance. We then took that guidance back to the focus group participants for feedback and produced a defined version which went to ULTC for discussion, and finally to UEC for approval.
What does the guidance tell us?
The guidance provides the broad principles of ethical good practice and its main thrust is about embedding the discussion of ethics throughout the curriculum. Rather than trying to teach ethics in isolation it’s more about helping students to think critically about ethics, and thus be able to reflect on ethical issues as they go through the research process.
We want them to be considering the challenges and limitations of research – both existing research and their own research – and ethical considerations are part of that. Our goal is for ethical considerations to be more integrated in students’ thinking and more clearly relevant to people’s lives.
The guidance also reminds us that an understanding of ethics is relevant to all subjects. We want students to take on an ethical mindset even if they are not going to become researchers. They should come out as critical consumers of research at the very least. Some students might go on to publish their own research or to commission research in their workplace and so will need a practical working understanding of ethics. Some will go on to become academic researchers and potentially teaching future researchers!
The guidance encourages developing an ethical mindset rather than seeing ‘ethics’ as a one-off event. It acknowledges that we are all constantly learning and adapting no matter how experienced we are, and it is important to demonstrate to students that this is an ongoing process and there is no definitive right or wrong. So it’s more about how we interact with ethics – we want people to be asking how their research will impact them as a researcher, how will their findings change things in the future, how does conducting the research affect people, what impact do I hope this will have on the world, what could be the unintended consequences? Our teaching should support students on their research journey:
What do you think the impact of the guidance will be on staff/students?
Our overall aim is for thinking about ethical research practices to become part of what we do as educators and to be echoed throughout the curriculum. I hope the guidance will cause people to stop and think about how they teach research ethics and how that can be integrated into their teaching. There needs to be ongoing discussions around how it works in each discipline. The subsequent impact on learners is likely to be a bit further down the line.
What are the next steps?
We have some follow-on funding to work intensively with three Schools to understand how the guidance can be effectively rolled out, and how things change as a result. We’d like to work with all Schools in this way, but sadly that is not possible. A useful overview of the guidance is available on the AQPO webpage and will be promoted through the Education bulletin and the School Education Directors network. We may even host an event with BILT about this – watch this space!
