Antinomies of Net Ethics/Research
"Big Brother" or Allies?
In Defense of IRBs and RCR
Jim Thomas / Sociology / Northern Illinois University
(9 June, 2001)
(Forthcoming in SSSI Notes, Fall, 2001).
We rarely pay attention to ethical issues in research until
something goes horribly wrong. Then, we are challenged for a
methodological accounting. In the belief that researchers need
pre-crisis education in how to conduct responsible research, the
U.S. Public Health service recently enacted a policy that public
and private sector research institutions implement training on
research ethics (NIH, 2000). How the education occurs and who
should receive the education will be left to individual
institutions. However, the intent of the RCR policy is clear: All
researchers, even those whose work is not federally funded, should
receive at least some RCR education (NIH, 2001). Failure to
comply with RCR guidelines could jeopardize an institution's
federal funding.
Although federal implementation of this "Responsible Conduct of
Research" (RCR) initiative has been delayed for a year because of
a jurisdictional dispute with Congress (Tauzin and Greenwood,
2001), many universities have begun exploring ways to assure
compliance with RCR guidelines in anticipation of the policies
taking effect in October, 2001. Combined with increased scrutiny
by Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), critics of the new federal
"responsibility initiative" have increasingly expressed concerns
that compliance with the new policies may jeopardize academic
freedom, First Amendment rights, and the free flow of
empirically-based ideas.
WHO CARES?
Why should symbolic interactionists take an aggressive stand in
supporting recent federal guidelines for educating researchers on
responsible research? One reason is that, as of this writing, it
isn't clear whether the SSSI has a statement or a set of ethical
guidelines. Another is that, as methodologists, teachers, journal
editors, reviewers, and commentators, we continue to confront
ethical dilemmas in our own field. Consider a few dramatic
examples from qualitative research.
When Humphries (1970) published Tea Room Trade over two decades
ago, he drew unprecedented criticism from social scientists for
perceived ethical flaws in his study of gay culture and
lifestyles. He lingered in truckstop restrooms and watched for
gay sexual activity, on occasion even serving as "lookout" for the
participants, and then surreptitiously recorded their automobile
license numbers. Joe Kotarba's (1979) study of intimacy in a
public jail visiting room drew shrilly misguided and somewhat
paralogical criticism for questionable ethics (Deegan, 1980).
When allegations of plagiarism arose in two nationally-prominent
sociology journals in the 1990s, executive boards of the relevant
societies were confronted with allegations of their potential
complicity in malfeasance. The dramatic Carnegie Mellon
cyber-culture study of online pornography (Rimm, 1995), later
featured as a cover story in Time magazine (Elmer-Dewitt, 1995),
came under fire for gross ethical and methodological violations
when it was revealed that ten different levels of
gatekeepers--professionals who should have spotted the
lapses--ignored them (Thomas, 1996a). Mario Brajuha refused to
give his fieldnotes to police when subpoened following a
suspicious fire in the restaurant where he collected his data
(Brajuha and Hallowell, 1986). His experience challenged other
ethnographers to examine their commitment to protect their
subjects. It is in this spirit that I defend IRB/RCR initiatives.
PROTECTION OF HUMAN SUBJECTS
In the examples above, the heart of responsible research
procedures, and certainly the concern of IRB oversight, is the
protection of human subjects. RCR/IRB policies originally grew out
of concern for human subjects and data-use issues primarily in the
medical and experimental sciences. The most egregious and dramatic
recent violations of human subjects research have come from the
medical sciences, typified by the University of Minnesota paying
the U.S. $32 million in the late 1990s to settle a lawsuit
alleging over two decades of illegal drug profiteering and
mishandling of grant funds; allegations of violations of informed
consent policies in the Virginia Twin Study in 1998 that shut down
all federally-funded biomedical research at Virginal Commonwealth
University; the mid-1990s allegations of research fraud against
AIDS scholar Robert Gallo; the suspension of medical research in
1999 at the University of Illinois/Chicago for alleged
improprieties of human subjects protection; and the brouhaha at
Northwestern University over whether a postdoctoral reseacher has
the right to publish research without permission of their
professors (Curry, 2001).
Yet, the definition of human subjects is broad. Consistent with
guidelines of other professional organizations (Thomas, 1996b),
the NIH definition from Title 45 CFR Part 46, "Protection Of Human
Subjects," consistent with the explicit or implied definitions of
social science professional organizations, defines a human subject
as:
...a living individual about whom an investigator (whether
professional or student) conducting research obtains
(1) data through intervention or interaction with the
individual,
(2) identifiable private information."
In the extreme, some pundits argue, this means that the Fox
television network can air Temptation Island, a show about buff
young heterosexual couples thrown together in an exotic location
to see who can seduce whom, but--as scholars--we may not write
about it without IRB approval, which might even require signed
informed consent documents. In reality, however, this
over-stated example typifies several misconceptions about IRB/RCR
activity.
First, neither federal guidelines nor the American Sociological
Association's (ASA) code of ethics forbids research in public
places (ASA, 1997). The ASA code explicitly accepts covert
research that involves minimal risk for research participants and
that could not practicably be carried out were informed consent
to be required (ASA, 1997: 12.01(b)). ASA guidelines also
recognize the acceptability of research in public places where no
reasonable expectation of privacy exists (ASA, 1997: 12.01(c)).
Generally, IRB guidelines would exempt such research, and RCR
education would alert students and faculty to the kinds of
ethical issues that could occur in, for example, conducting
public breaching experiments, or other intrusive public data
gathering.
Second, neither current nor proposed federal guidelines would ban
specific topics or methods a priori, and nothing in either the
spirit or letter of RCR education or IRB policies represents "big
brother" imposing censorship on scholars. The intent of the new
federal guidelines is to sensitize people involved in the
research process of things that can go wrong and to remind us of
the diverse interests and responsibilities of the wide range of
stake-holders.
Third, despite the experiences of many of us with IRB challenges
to our methodology, there is little hard evidence that IRB
scrutiny contains an anti-qualitative bias. In fact, the
protocols governing physical intervention in human subjects seem
more rigorous, perhaps because of the recently publicized ethical
malfeasance in medicine, genetic engineering, and related fields.
Following the dictum that it is best to avoid attributing to
malice that for which cluelessness will suffice, the appearance
of an anti-qualitative IRB bias is mostly the result of two
factors. First, medical and related professions tend to have more
safeguards in place and a longer history of ethical oversight and
compliance. Second, qualitative approaches are more nuanced,
more variable, and the risks not always as obvious (or
remediable), thus contributing to questioning by those unfamiliar
with what we do.
Fourth, concern with potential threats to academic freedom and
scientific inquiry prompts some researchers to judge IRB/RCR
activity as a threat to unfettered scholarship. However, a
compelling argument can be made that implementing RCR training
and encouraging, rather than resisting, stringent IRB oversight
is in our individual and collective interests. It increases the
integrity of our research by assuring that we are taking action
to "do the right thing" in the field. It also encourages us, as
individuals, to constantly reflect on the consequences of our
research and the processes by which we conduct it.
Finally, and most important, IRB/RCR issues are not simply about
human subjects. They address the fundamental processes of
inquiry. Human subjects may be the most heavily emphasized,
especially with IRBs, but we should also recognize the importance
of the other core issues. The Office of Research Integrity (ORI)
identifies nine core areas for educational training (ORI, 2000):
a) data acquisition, management, sharing, and ownership
b) Mentor/trainee relationships
c) Publication practices and responsible authorship
d) Peer review
e) Collaborative science
f) Human Subjects
g) Research involving animals
h) Research misconduct
i) Conflict of interest/commitment
A tenth, cultural/ethnic diversity in the research environment
has become an additional core issue. Education of staff,
faculty, and students in these areas not only helps us recognize
potential danger areas in our own research, but alerts others to
their rights as subjects or subordinates.
CONCLUSION
Because federal IRB/RCR leave specific, practices, content, and
audience for individual institutions, the level of awareness and
understanding of unique issues related to interactionist research
varies dramatically. As a consequence, the SSSI might adopt a few
common-sense steps to assure that our methodological and
paradigmatic concerns are adequately represented.
First, because of inter-institutional policy variance, the SSSI
should develop a common set of principles and issues that members
can present to their IRB/RCR representatives. Second, the SSSI
should take an aggressive proactive stance in identifying the
types of ethical and related issues that we continue to face in
our teaching, scholarship, and publishing. This can be done by
more actively sharing experiences, by encouraging research ethics
to be integrated into methodology courses, by commissioning an
occasional ethics-related article for our journal and newsletter,
and by including relevant sessions at the Stone-Couch symposium
and the ASA meetings. Third, we should solicit problems that
qualitative scholars are having with their own institution's IRBs
and find ways to reduce them. Fourth, interactionists and other
qualitative scholars should actively volunteer for IRB/RCR
activity in order to educate others in the nuances of our
methods. Finally, we should increase our dialog on ethical
issues that most of us involved in teaching, research, and
publishing continually confront, both in our own projects and in
those of our colleagues.
Issues of responsible research clearly affect us all, as
scholars, as gatekeepers, as policy makers, as educators. The
recent federal guidelines will dramatically increase the need for
us to be sensitive to the complexity of the issues. Therefore,
it's important to remember that IRBs are not designed to restrict
research, to prohibit topics, or to impose "politically correct"
attitudes on scholars. Nor are RCR committees designed to create
rules for conduct. Instead, the former are intended to assure
that we "do right" by our subjects, and the latter to help
sensitize us to potential ethical issues that can occur at all
phases of our enterprise. They are simply mechanisms that, if
used properly, can assist us in "doing the right." Therefore, we
should embrace, rather than resist, their tenets, and remember
that education cuts both ways.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
American Sociological Association (ASA). 1997. ASA Code of
Ethics. http://www.asanet.org/ecoderev.htm
Brajuha, Mario and Lyle Hallowell. 1986. "Legal Intrusion and
the Politics of Fieldwork: The Impact of the Brajua Case." Urban
Life, 14:454-478.
Curry, Dan. 2001. "Chemistry Journal Shelves Article After the
Author's Former Mentor Raises Objections." Chronicle of Higher
Education. June 4. Pp??
Deegan, May Jo. 1980. "On Responsibility in Ethnography: Comment
on Kotarba." Qualitative Sociology. 3(Winter): 323-329.
Elmer-Dewit, Philip. 1995. "On a Screen Near You: Cyberporn."
Time Magazine, pp. 38-43. July 3.
Federal Register. 1991. Part II: Federal Policy for the
Protection of Human Subjects; Notices and Rules. Washington:
U.S. Government Printing Office.
Humphreys, Laud. 1970. Tearoom Trade; Impersonal Sex in Public
Places. Chicago: Aldine.
Kotarba, Joseph A. 1979. "The Accomplishment of Intimacy in the
Jail Visiting Room." Qualitative Sociology, 2(September): 80-103.
Marquart, James B. and Jim Thomas. 1988. "Dirty Knowledge and
Clean Conscience: The Dilemmas of Ethnographic Research." Pp.
81-96 in D. Maines and C. Couch (Eds.), Information,
Communication and Social Structure. Springfield, Ill.: Charles
C. Thomas.
National Institute of Health (NIH). 2000. "Required education in
the Protection of Human Research Participants."
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-00-039.html
____. 2001. "Frequently Asked Questions for the Requirements for
Education on the Protection of Human Subjects.
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/hs_educ_faq.htm
Office of Research Integrity (ORI). 2000. "PHS Policy on
Instruction in t he Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR)." U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services.
http://ori.dhhs.gov/html/programs/finalpolicy.asp
Tauzin, W.J. and James Greenwood. 2001. Letter from
Congressional Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations to
Office of Research Integrity. February 5.
http://ori.dhhs.gov/html/programs/congressionalconcernsinquiry.asp
Thomas, Jim. 1996a. "When Cyber-Research Goes Awry: The Ethics
of the Rimm 'Cyberporn' Study." The Information Society. 12(2):
189-197.
_____. 1996b. "Introduction: A Debate about the Ethics of Fair
Practices for Collecting Data in Cyberspace." The Information
Society, 12(2): 107-117.
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