The previous version of the British Educational Research Association ethical guidance has been in existence since 2011. Over the last two years a consultative process, led by Sara Hennessey and a working group together with the BERA membership, recognised experts and with the support of a dedicated research associate, has led to a revised set of guidance. This takes into consideration revisions by other, related professional and academic bodies – in particular the work of the Academy of Social Sciences who relaunched their own guidance after significant debate in 2016 – and recent legislative/regulatory change – in particular the EU-wide General Data Protection Regulation and associated update to the UK Data Protection Act in 2018.

The guidance has been designed to be more deliberative and less prescriptive to recognise the situated nature of ethical decision-making; empowering researchers to make their own analysis of research situations and hold up against principled ethical guidance. An extra section relating to responsibilities to researchers’ development and well-being has been included to offer support to the extra responsibilities such a reflexive approach brings.

The guidance has also been designed to be more inclusive to the broad church of research which might be considered to be educational research. There has been much thought given to ethical issues likely to be encountered by practitioner and independent researchers and those researching in non-UK settings. Attention has been given to ensuring that educational researchers feel that all methodological options can be pursued, as long as careful ethical deliberation accompanies research design. Particular advice relating to specific methodological or research methods, such as ethnography, autoethnography, observational methods and randomised control trials, are illustrated throughout.

Serious reflection and debate amongst the working group and with those consulted have led to revision of guidance relating to online research and the use of digital data to help members in considering the challenges in deciding who owns data, whether and how consent might be gained, how such data might need to be handled and reported. Similarly advice about collecting data from vulnerable participants including children has been reviewed, especially in the light of new data protection regulations.

The guidance has been revised rather than rewritten and the core principle of showing an ethic of respect, which leads to a need for research relationships to be built on trust and covering the broad range of responsibilities researchers, and those involved in research, need to consider, is retained.

A special issue of BERA’s magazine Research Intelligence 136/Summer 2018 includes an article ‘Behind the scenes of the revision’ and the new guidance can be downloaded from the BERA website.

Building on my earlier post, all researchers (actually all citizens of the EU) need to get themselves ready for the change in legislation around collecting, using and sharing our personal data. For us in the UK this will replace the Data Protection Act, which we have been beholden to since 1998, with the new regulations coming in across Europe on 25 May 2018.

In the UK this falls under the remit of the Information Commissioner’s Office who have conducted consultations as part of the European initiative and will be our national data protection authority. The Information Commissioners’ Office supply a Guide to the GDPR as well as a page with updates as the final stages of clarification of the detailed implementation of the GDPR become apparent. These pages are in particular written for organisations who act as ‘data controllers’ and ‘data processors’ (using similar definitions of each to our existing Data Protection Act). Researchers operating within Universities should expect that their University will guide them with GDPR-compliant policies and procedures (and hold them to these as accountability is one of the key obligations of data controllers) to allow them to organise data collection, storage and reporting for individual/group projects. What needs to be clarified is the extent to which such researchers are data controllers ie. responsible for determining the purposes of their study’s data collection and not only data processors ie. responsible to the data controllers for collecting, storing and reporting the data. Independent researchers, by necessity, will hold both roles in full. There are a particular set of responsibilities set out for each and the ICO have helped summarise these in two checklists. One key aspect of the GDPR is that data protection should be something which is designed into the way we work with data and not something which is retrospectively or reactively applied but, instead, should be achieved through privacy by design (referred to in article 25 of the GDPR).

We all need to keep our eyes on where we still stand in relation to the GDPR after the UK leaves the EU and becomes a third country (Follow this link to a recent report issued about report about how the EU are getting ready for this) as the regulations apply to both those working in institutions in the EU, even if collecting data from outside the EU as many researchers with international studies do, and those in countries collecting data from those in the EU from beyond the EU. Non EU (third) countries are currently being vetted for those approved to have adequate data protection protection. It is still possible for cross-border transfer of data with those not considered adequate under circumstances outlined in articles 46(1) and 49 of the GDPR.

One of the major changes of the GDPR is the increase in rights of data subjects  ie. those about whom data is collected and processed. This applies to the data trail any of us leave related to our personal data ie. that which can be used to identify us and to which we have a right to protect as part of our right to privacy.  The GDPR sets out the data protection right for individuals:

1. to be informed (about its collection, storage and use)
2. of access (to data held about us)
3. to rectification (of inaccuracies)
4. to erasure (once used for legal purposes)
5. to restrict processing (whilst other rights are being investigated)
6. to data portability (once collected and at our request)
7. to object (to decisions made about our data)
8. in relation to automated decision making and profiling (as used on some social media platforms and commercial search engines)

In summary, the GDPR is underpinned by 6 principles (to be found in Article 5(1))

1. Lawfulness, fairness and transparency (which relate to clear communications, systematic processes and legal purposes)
2. Purpose limitation (meaning that data is only collected for specified purposes)
3. Data minimisation (such that only data needed for the specific purpose is collected)
4. Accuracy (such that data subjects can object if this is not correct and so needs to be up-to-date)
5. Storage limitation (such that data subjects know how long the data will be collected, which should only be as long as to be used for specified purposes)
6. Integrity and confidentiality (which link to the fundamental right of us all to privacy)

There is still fine tuning taking place between now and May 2018. For example a consultation about consent and transparency was just completed in January 2018 and the Information Commissioner’s Office provided detailed guidance on Children and the GDPR for public consultation, which closes on 28 February 2018. This is a particular area of regulation change. For example consent will be needed for data which could identify children (including images and audio) from their parents/guardians and/or from themselves. Children will be considered able to give consent from the age of 16 across EU and maybe as low as age 13 in the UK. Keep an eye out on the ICO What’s new page…!

To keep informed and get ready I recommend a) keeping an eye out and following ICO guidance and b) joining the University of Groningen’s excellent course on FutureLearn ‘Understanding the GDPR’ – open for registration NOW.

Credit for image: Surveystance

When I was at the British Educational Research Association annual conference at Brighton earlier this month, I attended a thought provoking presentation led by Elsie Whittington, from University of Sussex, entitled Consent Education: Undoing the Binary and Embracing Ambiguity. She won 2nd price in the early career researcher presentation awards, very deservedly. Elsie was discussing her research with adolescents about what constituted consent in the context of personal, social, health and education (PSHE Association Curriculum). When fully published this will illuminate how young people in her study expressed the way their perceptions and behaviours are affected by complex emotional, cognitive and social factors. From an ethical point of view, in terms of the research implications undertaken in school contexts, Elsie raised the contradiction faced by the young people about being at school, for which they have not given active consent, and being asked to discuss consent. For me this raises the need when planning research in compulsory educational settings, or other non-consenting settings such as prisons/young offender units or medical institutions, in which inhabitants have been sectioned, to take full consideration of this contradiction as perceived/experienced by participants. Elsie’s study and many others using participatory research methods, for example those discussed on the FutureLearn course People Studying People: Ethics in Society and also hosted on Doing Ethical Research), offer appropriate methodological approaches. In such studies researchers create the safe and open spaces, using ‘young people-appropriate’ methods of data collection, which could allow raising this as an issue as part of gaining their informed consent to participate in any research.

Of course, gaining consent from young people (and not just relying on their parents/carers/guardians as gatekeepers), is always important – not just in such contexts. This should not be something we expect to be possible to gain in advance and taken as read for the whole study. If potential participants have not experienced such research before, how can they really know how they feel about it/what the implications are for them? Being able to be fully informed and give full and meaningful consent, will develop as a study develops. This was something we discussed as part of the Ethics in Educational Ethnography symposium at the European Educational Research Association conference last month, particularly in response to Ingrid Smette’s presentation Ethics and Access when Consent must come first. Consequences of Formalised Research Ethics for Ethnographic Fieldwork in Schools . 

What will the UK’s departure from the European Union do to the UK’s data protection regulations and therefore our responsibilities as researchers handling data? This is as yet unknown as the UK have not yet decided which European legislation they will retain and what will need to be relegislated for by the UK judiciary. This is further complicated by the plans which were initiated prior to the UK Referendum and decision to leave the EU to replace the Data Protection Act 1998 with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR was adopted by the European Parliament in April 2016 and is intended for adoption throughout EU member states by 2018 ie. before BREXIT negotiations complete. This was noted as an issue by lawyers and data protection experts prior to Article 50 being invoked eg. Hasan (2016) Data protection and BREXIT and since eg. the week in March Tim Barrow handed in Theresa May’s letter to Donald Tusk, as President of the European Council (Lee, 2017) The Future of Data Protection Law Post-Brexit and more recently eg. Mullock and Shooter (2017) Brexit: Data Protection and Cyber-Security Law Implications.

Data protection expert Phil Lee (partner in the Privacy, Security and Information law group) summarised the likely process which will need to take place with regard to retaining data protection regulation. “The UK government has signalled that, in order to provide continuing legal certainty for citizens and businesses, all existing European law will essentially be “copied and pasted” into UK law in time by the time the UK leaves the EU” (Lee, 2017). He goes on to say that… “The Great Repeal Bill …aims to give the UK government the power to adopt secondary legislation (i.e. laws that are aren’t subject to full Parliamentary scrutiny and so are more quickly and easily adopted) that will ‘tweak’ the converted EU laws in a way that ensures they will have meaning in the UK” (Lee, 2017) and that we need to hope that we are considered by the EU to be an ‘adequate’ country “meaning it can freely send and receive data back and forth with the EU” (Lee, 2017)

James Mullock and Simon Shooter (Partners in the UK firm Bird and Bird) suggest that options will be to “put the UK in the position of having to adopt either EU strength data protection laws (to join countries such as Canada as benefiting from an adequacy decision), or an EC approved data transfer mechanism (as the USA is currently seeking to do via the EU-US Privacy Shield)” (Mullock and Shooter, 2017).

As well as our research within EU contexts there are also other aspects of the current Data Protection Act 1998 and forthcoming General Data Protection Regulations which researchers will need to look out for changes in, for example, if collecting data in non-EU (as currently referenced in Schedule 4 of the Data Protection Act) contexts…Phil Lee’s article offers a good summary of the key changes expected in the GDPR.

As, in July 2017, we are only in the early stages of negotiations with the EU, focusing on EU agendas which need to be agreed sufficiently to be able to move forward into more bilateral discussions, it would be worth keeping a weather eye out for what happens to the GDPR and what this might mean for us as researchers wanting to ensure we collect, store and use data responsibly.

Alison Fox(a), Jim Askham(b) and Rachel Tunstall(b),

a=The Open University

b=University of Leicester

A presentation given to the FutureLearn Academic Network conference on 16th June 2017 at the Open University available at: FLAN presentation June 16th 2017

It is good to know that guidance on how we should act ethically when researching is constantly under review, given the changes in society and the new challenges this places on researchers. Challenges such as an increasing diversity of online sites which are spaces social science researchers want to enter or observe to answer questions of interest, such as: how do people behave when they interact yet don’t meet face-to-face? what use is social media to those who interact on it? how do online identities develop and how do they relate to people’s offline lives? what threats do interacting online pose to people? There are questions raised by our increasingly digitalised worlds as to who owns our data, who gives permission for this data to be shared and whether we are aware of what data is ‘out there’ in the public domain. This data, often available at scale – the so-called ‘big data ‘ both offers opportunities for researchers and challenges for them to ensure they are treating the authors of the data ethically. One of the dilemmas this opens up is whether to anonymise data (which authors have already chosen to make public) or whether to credit them with their name (to respect their intellectual property rights)?

The British Educational Research Association (BERA) ethical guidelines for educational research from 2011 are currently under review. This is being carried out through a consultation of those with expertise borne from their experience of enquiry into ethical issues and application of ethical frameworks, followed by survey of all BERA members. This is designed to check the current guidance as being ‘fit for purpose’ for the modern world and its challenges. A launch of the amended ethical guidance is scheduled for the annual conference in September 2017, this year in the University of Sussex, Brighton.

More broadly, the UK Information Commission are also reviewing their strategies for international data regulation and policies for data regulation in the UK, including the appropriateness and relevance of acts such as Data Protection and Freedom of Information, to take account of current and arising global issues. The Information Commission Office say:

“our focus at this stage will remain on establishing what our priorities should be, rather than rushing to produce guidance. That means plenty more listening to what people are concerned about, and where they’d like to see us ultimately focus our efforts around guidance” (source).

Specifically in terms of online research there is an international Association of Internet Research (AoIR), which produces ethical guidance for researchers, and covers many of the knotty issues outlined above. The latest version of this guidance was produced in 2012 and links to a wide range of studies to support the advice offered. There is a working committee keeping abreast of issues and new research coming through.

If you are in a professional association and/or your research needs to align with particular legislation or ethical guidance, it would be worthwhile checking and logging into any alerts, about reviews underway.

#FLresearchethics

#researchethics

What does giving voice to research participants mean when the norm is to offer them confidentiality and anonymity? To what extent do we have a responsibility to reveal their reported views, offered to us, to the wider audiences our studies aim to reach?

The last couple of decades has seen both thinking and empirical work about pupil voice – and pupils may well be research participants in educational research. The work of Michael Fielding (1)(2) in (3) and Groundwater-Smith and Mockler (4) in particular encourages teachers and academics committed to realising pupil voice to develop pupils as researchers to agenda set and co-construct knowledge . Fielding (2) and others eg. SOUNDOUT (5) relate this to a model of pupil participation originally offered by Arnstein and adapted by Hart. This work can be seen to have an ethical basis; the giving of voice, the empowering of pupils not only to have their voice included in research but, if given equity in power within schools, to drive research. This is one way of showing respect to pupils not merely as subjects of educational research but also as potential ‘agents of change’ (2). One current study by Angele Pulis is exploring the potential for students to drive school improvement through acting as assessors of quality in Maltese settings (6).

Teacher voice is something less easy to find directly addressed in empirical research literature, although there are examples eg. A recent Australian study of professional development which gave equal voice to Pre-and In-service teachers (7) and a growing interest in marginalised voices such as male primary school teachers (8) (9) and those in non-uk contexts (10).

So, returning to how should such voices be reported?

• Does this mean that participant voices should be quoted directly as much as possible in written and oral reporting?
• Should these extracts of verbatim text be offered to the public named or unnamed?
• How do we balance participants’ rights to their intellectual property in terms of their data given to a project against their right to privacy (as anonymity)?
• Offering the choice to some in a project to be named and others to remain anonymous isn’t a solution as naming some is likely to reveal the anonymity not only of other participants but also the institution?
• This is also a dilemma for practitioner researchers. However much they commit to anonymising the organisation in which they work when reporting, as both a direct and indirect mechanism to protect the identities of participants, when their name as the author is on the cover, isn’t it now too easy to find their employment as part of an individual’s digital footprint?
• We need to revisit why we offer anonymity – honestly? To what extent is offering anonymity for our benefit as researchers – to gain what is often considered more ‘honest’ data for the purposes of addressing our research aims – rather than for the participants’ benefit to protect their identity and any local implications of what they offer to the study (and is reported) in our research?
• If we want our studies to be emancipatory then shouldn’t we be offering our research as a place to allow participants to voice their views more openly (especially when this is openly challenging)? However, can we offer our research as a safe space? Can we defend the participants’ rights to be heard?
• If we adopt this open research approached are we likely only to include those who are ‘up for this’ and therefore exclude those who prefer to be less openly confrontational (and yet would want to offer their views for the greater good)
• This seems to me to have parallels with the debate people find themselves having with themselves in terms of whether and how to use social media. How private or how public should we be with our views? How do we (or do we) want to be heard?
• I conclude by pointing to a brave piece of collaborative research where all participants name themselves, evidently feeling safe to do so (11).

Web references 

(1) http://www.edugains.ca/resourcesSV/StudentVoiceResearch/StudentsasRadicalPartnersofChange.pdf

(2) http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00002544.doc

(3) http://www.pearsonpublishing.co.uk/education/catalogue/49847X.html

(4) Groundwater-Smith, S. And Mockler, N. (2016) From data source to co-researchers? Tracing the shift from ‘student voice’ to student-teacher partnerships in Educational Action Research, Educational Axtion Research, 24 (2): 159-176.

(5) https://soundout.org/ladder-of-student-involvement/

(6) https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/pupil-voice-in-quality-assurance-of-school

(7) Simpson, A. (2016) Dialogic teaching in the initial teacher education classroom: “Everyone’s voice will be heard”, Research Papers in Education, 31 (3), 89-106.

(8) Trent, J. (2015) The gendered, hierarchical construction of teacher identities: exploring the male primary school teacher voice in Hong Kong, Journal of Educational Policy, 30 (4), 500-517.

(9) Bosworth, J. (2016) What factors can influence male trainee teachers’ successful completion of a Primary PGCE course? presentation at TEAN annual conference, May 5-6th 2016.

(10) Samuel, M. (2014) South African teacher voices: recurring resistances and reconstructions for teacher education and development, Journal of Education for Teaching, 40 (5), 610-621.

(11) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Researching-Schools-Schools-University-Partnership-Educational/dp/B017AJXOQA/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1462623614&sr=8-5&keywords=School+university++McLaughlin

This is the title of a blog posted to the British Educational Research Association blog in 2015. It is a general post covering The impact of globalisation on research ethics, proposing that Boundary crossing demands ethical reflexivity and making A call for dynamic, sensitive and sensible ethical appraisal. To find this post,and others covering the broad scope of interests of the BERA membership, go to: https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/research-ethics-addressing-the-tensions-and-opportunities-of-globalisation

I was asked to consider the place of ethicality in the new Teaching Excellence Framework brought in for UK Universities as a result of a Green Paper in Autumn 2015. For my response which speaks to the inter-relationships summarised as Figure 1 (Fox, 2015, p15) below, as well as other papers written by BERA members about the implications of this new framework, please refer to the British Educational Research Association’s Research Intelligence winter 2015 issue, downloadable for free from: https://www.bera.ac.uk/researchers-resources/publications/winter-2015

There is some debate as to whether content posted on social media is available for researchers to access and utilise. Some researchers have carried out their e-research covertly and collected data taking the stance that the data is already in the public domain (eg. Whiteman, 2010; Casey et al, 2014). Whiteman (2010) entered an online fanzine forum as a potential fan. It was predecided that to have disclosed her research interests would have affected the participation in the forum. She did eventually disclose her activity and offer her thesis to the site, after the forum crashed and she revealed that she had records of the activity. Casey and colleagues (2014) wanted to study young people’s authentic views of school PE, as to whether they ‘loved’ or ‘hated’ Physical Education. Posts from these two perspectives were found to be relatively easy to search for within social media traffic, with no way to find out who had posted them.

This is one of the problems for researchers. People can create an online identity for themselves when posting on social media platforms. They don’t need to provide their real name, or personal details. All the pre-13 year olds on Facebook are testamount to the ease of access to these sites even though these age groups are not allowed legally. Social media participants are offering themselves to this public space as an avatar which, according to the Oxford Dictionaries, is defined as: ‘an icon or figure representing a particular person in computer games, Internet forums, etc.‘ – a representation, rather than a presentation of self.

Another problem is that researchers would be using data for different purposes than the author first intended. Although social media participants aren’t ultimately in control of where their posting travels, as people are actively encouraged to ‘share’ and ‘retweet’ (if on twitter), they may not imagine that their comments will be analysed and reported in other public forms, such as academic papers.

In 2o12 the Association of Internet Researchers revised their ethical guidance and, in this respect, noted that ‘People may operate in public spaces but maintain strong perceptions or expectations of privacy’ (AoIR, 2012, p6). The AOiR ethical gudiance, so helpful across the range of ethical issues associated with internet research, offers a really useful set of references from researchers who have revealed and examined this issue of public versus private data, pointing us to: Bassett & O’Riordan (2002); Bromseth (2002); Gajjala (2004); Hudson and Bruckman (2004); McKee & Porter (2009); Sveningsson (2003).

A further problem raised when planning to research social media activity is that, even if you decide to be open about your research and invite participants to make available their posts for the purposes of your research study,  their posts will involve interaction with others. How do you then feel about these ‘passive’ participants in your research? Is it possible to gain informed consent for the data you collect from social media postings, especially given the first point about many being posted by ‘avatars’ rather than identifiable people?

Beyond thinking about whether and how to gain informed consent the next things to consider, to make practical steps forward to undertaking such research, are: a) to think about how you can protect those who have provided data (knowingly or unknowingly) to your study and b) what risk of harm you are opening them to? Thinking and reporting your decisions as a researcher in these online contexts will contribute to the field and body of advice for future researchers.

References

Association of Internet Researchers (2012) Ethical decision-making and Internet research 2.0: Recommendations from the AoIR ethics working committee, Approved by the Ethics Working Committee, 08/2012. Endorsed by the AOIR Executive Committee, 09/2012. Approved by the AOIR general membership, 12/2012.

Bassett, E. H., & O’Riordan, K. (2002). Ethics of internet research: Contesting the human subjects research model. Ethics and Information Technology, 4 (3), 233-249. Available at: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/ethics_bas_full.html

Bromseth, J. C. H. (2002). Public places – public activities? Methodological approaches and ethical dilemmas in research on computer-mediated communication contexts. In A. Morrison (Ed.), Researching ICTs in Context (pp. 33-61). Inter/Media Report 3/2002. Oslo: University of Oslo.

Casey, A., Hill, J. and Goodyear, V.A. (2014) “PE doesn’t stand for Physical Education. It stands for Public Embarrassment”: Voicing experiences and proffering solutions to girls’ disengagement in (pp. 37-49) Physical Education, in Flory, S.B., Tischler, A. and Sanders, S. (Eds). Sociocultural Issues in Physical Education: Case Studies for Teachers. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield.

Gajjala, R. (2004). Cyber Selves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women. Walnut Creek: Altamire Press.

Hudson, J. M., & Bruckman, A. (2004). Go away: Participant objections to being studied and the ethics of chatroom research. Information Society, 20(2), 127-139.

McKee, H. A., & Porter, J. E. (2009). The Ethics of Internet Research: A Rhetorical, Case-based Process. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Sveningsson-Elm, M. (2009). How do various notions of privacy influence decision making in qualitative internet research. In Markham, A. & Baym, N. (Eds.).internet Inquiry: Conversation about method (pp. 69-87). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Whiteman, N. (2010) Control and Contingency: Maintaining Ethical Stances in Research, International Journal of Internet Research Ethics, Issue 3 (1), 6-22.