Anthropology, sociology and psychology research projects are now subject to ethical review. The Ministry of Science and Technology has mandated that all research projects involving human participants — including observations, interviews and questionnaire surveys — must first pass a research ethics review, and it is planning to extend this requirement to master’s and doctoral dissertations.
The reviews assess three levels of risk, these being virtually zero risk, minimal risk and more than minimal risk. Similar requirements have been in place for decades in the West, but Taiwan does not seem to have learned much from the experience there.
The ministry has authorized several academic research centers to undertake the reviews, and the fee for doing a review of research considered to have a “minimal level of risk,” for example, is about NT$15,000, which is quite a lot of money for a research student. Furthermore, the review criteria and requirements focus on issues of privacy, harm and clarity — even the drafting of an informed consent form.
In Western academia, it has been understood for some time that a single informed consent form signed prior to the research project cannot in itself guarantee that research ethics are adhered to throughout the project, and that research ethics are, instead, assured as a result of a continuous mutual understanding between the researcher and the subject in the field, as part of an ongoing process of negotiation.
The traditional consent form ignores much of the complexity of the actual situation in the field. The system of having reviews prior to the research project has led to increasingly few research projects on certain issues — for example on behavior such as running away from home, dealing or taking narcotics, or sexual behavior in public spaces — either because the researchers themselves would prefer to avoid them or because the proposals are failing ethics reviews.
Some of the implications of having these research ethics reviews are already well-known in other countries. They tend to result in, for example, a preponderance of studies on disadvantaged groups, as privileged groups tend not to sign the consent forms.
Another result is textual analysis, most of which does not require an ethics review, has by-and-large replaced field research, so that the government is unable to create substantive policies — for example on the prevention and treatment of HIV — because it does not have an accurate understanding of social behaviors as well as the difficulty of carrying out long-term comparative research due to the requirement that the data be destroyed after the research has been published.
Of course, research ethics is important, but enforcing Institutional Review Board ethics reviews is not the best solution. This will not, for example, stop problems such as false accounts and academic fraud. A better method would be to have research ethics — including discussion of individual cases — taught as part of university research methods classes; to have a section included in dissertation proposals on how research ethics is to be broached, which will be handled by the supervisor and an external reviewer; and to have peer oversight of the research findings after they are published, so that those who violate research ethics can be brought into line.
Research ethics involve more than privacy and informed consent; they also include other issues, such as improper citation, sexual or racial prejudice, fraud and the nature of the relationship between researcher and subject, and not all of these can be addressed by a review process at the research planning stage.
It would be better to set up a consultancy on research ethics rather than establish a special research project ethics review body, so that researchers can seek assistance from experts on issues that arise during the course of the research, and thereby guarantee that the quality of the dissertation is maintained.
Research ethics requirements can only really be satisfied by having thorough dissertations that can offer answers to social issues.
Bih Herng-dar is a professor in the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning at National Taiwan University.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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