When I arrived at Macquarie in 2007, I had big plans for my students.  I was scheduled to teach a postgraduate methods class, and I decided that the students were going to learn research methods by undertaking their own research project from start to finish and trying to publish the results.

“Crazy!” one of my colleagues said.  “Do you really think that they can get published?”

“Of course!” I said. “Have you seen how many journals there are out there?  You can publish anything if you are persistent enough.”

Another colleague said, “What are you going to do about ethics clearance?”

Uh-oh.  I hadn’t thought about that.  But I wasn’t going to let it derail my plan, so my ad hoc solution was to make each of my students apply for ethics clearance.  Macquarie has 30+ page ethics application form for human research — not including appendices.

I tell you, the students LOVED that.  And so did the Ethics Secretariat, which had to process 20 ethics applications from one class and deal with weekly phone calls from me cheerfully asking when so-and-so’s project was going to get approved so s/he could start her research.  Some students didn’t get ethics approval to start their research until the last week of classes.  There were lots of extensions and late papers.

Despite the slow start and the frustrations, the work that my students did was really good.  In one semester, every student had to come up with their own original research projects, design an appropriate methodology, obtain ethics approval, execute the project, write up the results, and submit for publication. Every student came up with a completely unique research project, from researching the smoking practices of international students at Macquarie to investigating online lesbian networking in New South Wales to studying how Aboriginal artwork is marketed to tourists. Students gained a tremendous amount of hands-on research experience. At every seminar we discussed the progress of their research projects, and there were fascinating discussions about methods and ethics.  Even though they had largely seen the ethics application as an exercise in bureaucratic hoop-jumping, they were genuinely concerned with ethics, and we regularly discussed research ethics dilemmas.

So at the end of the year I decided that it was a good exercise and worth keeping the independent research projects the next time I taught the class. But the students were pretty clear in their feedback that they didn’t want to have to deal with the bureaucratic obstacles themselves.

Informal feedback from the Ethics Secretariat also suggested that they would be grateful if I found another solution (or at least stopped ringing them to ask about the status of students’ ethics applications).

Finding work-arounds for bureaucratic obstacles

So after the semester was over, I made an appointment to meet with the head of the Ethics Secretariat to try to find ways to simplify the ethics approval process for student research projects.  I’d gotten a fellowship from the Provost, Judyth Sachs, to work on this project, so I was empowered by significant institutional support.

We batted ideas around together. The Ethics Secretariat pointed out that Macquarie had a simpler process for evaluating student research projects that weren’t going to be published, but since helping students to publish was a major goal for me, I didn’t want to take that easy route.  They rejected the idea of a blanket template that would cover any sort of student research project.  I wanted to give my students some choice in what they could do.

The compromise that we worked out was this: I designed 4 basic research projects, all revolving around a different methodology and method of recruiting research participants. Students could then pick a project that already received ethics approval.  I tried to come up with projects that collectively would use every method that I could imagine a social science discipline using: online and street surveys; interviews, formal and informal; research in online communities; public observation; participant observation; even oral history, which has quite different conventions surrounding confidentiality and intellectual property than I was familiar with. The goal was to create a set of “templates” that colleagues could adapt to develop their own ethics applications for student research projects, so others could take advantage of my work and wouldn’t have to start from scratch.

The 4 projects

Here are the research projects I came up with, along with an extract from the project summary that I included in the ethics application. Each project title links to the full ethics application that I submitted. Of course, it is in the peculiar and particular format of Macquarie University’s ethics application form, but because MQ’s form is more elaborate than that of many other universities, you’re likely to find that I’ve dealt with most of the concerns that your own ethics committee or IRB might raise. All these ethics applications are Creative Commons licensed for non-profit use and adaptation, so feel free to borrow as much as you want. If you do decide to adapt one of these ideas for your own teaching, I’d love to hear about it! Send me an e-mail at lisa.wynn[at]mq.edu.au.

1) An ethnographic study of mobile phone use in Sydney

Anthropologists have always been interested in the relationship between technology and culture.  Contemporary anthropologists have recently been particularly interested in the spread of global communication technologies and how they are taken up in local social and cultural contexts (Axel 2006).  Mobile phones, in particular, have been revealed as devices which extend social networks in unique ways and which have been incorporated into local cultural norms about sharing, gift giving and exchange, and economic strategies (Smith 2007, Horst and Miller 2006, Wong 2007).  Corporate anthropologists have also researched the materiality of cell phones – where they are carried, how they are held, when they are turned off and on – to inform product design (Chipchase 2007).  Sociologists and psychologists have also examined the uptake of cell phone and messaging technologies amongst subcultural groups (e.g. Sylvia and Hady 2004).

Globally, some 3 billion people are expected to have cell phones by the end of this year, so it is clearly a technology that has a powerful global reach across cultures and socioeconomic class. How do new technologies such as cell phones extend or modify existing cultural norms and social networks?  What are the explicit and implicit cultural rules that shape how people use these technologies?

The methods for this study included street interviews and online questionnaires, as well as participant observation.

2) An ethnography of a virtual online social world

Tom Boellstorff (2008) poses this question: “How is everything from identity and community to property, place, and politics shaped the fact that human beings can now live parts of their lives in virtual worlds?”  Some of the potential research questions raised by cybersociality in online virtual worlds like Second Life include the following:

• How are social norms enforced and violated, and how does that contribute to a sense of community?
• What does identity mean in a massive multiplayer online role playing game when people can have alts (secondary accounts not linked to their primary avatar, or animated representative), or more than one person can control an avatar?
• What does embodiment mean in Second Life, where you can change your gender, body type, skin color, and even species at will, where other players can even *give* you a new body type to “wear,” and you can buy a penis to use for cybersex?  Do people change certain aspects of appearance (such as clothes or hair style ) more than others (such as body shape or gender)?  How often to people change their appearance?  To what extent does an avatar’s appearance influence how people interact with that avatar?
• What religious or cultural rituals do people engage in, in cyberspace?
• What are the social norms for gift-giving and reciprocity in cyberspace, and how does this contribute to community and sociability in cyber worlds?
• Are there coercive exchanges, and how are they handled or talked about?
• How does partnering occur in Second Life? Do virtual partners know each other in real life, and if not, how does it impinge on their real life worlds? What is the interface between Second Life and “real life”?

In this ethics application, I got a lot of help from Tom Boellstorff (whose ethnography on Second Life we read for the class). He generously shared with me his original ethics application for his research in Second Life, which I was able to draw on in figuring out how to answer the Ethics Committee’s concerns about privacy and the permissibility of research in Second Life.

3) Oral Histories of International Students in Australia

Education is a $12.5 billion “export industry” for Australia, bringing in more income than tourism (Rout 2008).  Yet little is known about the social experience of international students in Australia, despite the fact that they face unique pressures.  Rout (2008) summarized recent research that points out that, “Contrary to their image as cashed-up BMW drivers, many overseas students cannot afford to eat, are paid well below the minimum wage and are among those most vulnerable to exploitation in this country.”

For this project, students in ANTH 801 will conduct oral life histories of international students at Macquarie, focusing on their educational trajectory leading to, and including, their student experience at Macquarie.  How did they end up at Macquarie?  What are the personal, social, financial, and familial obligations that shape students’ experiences at university in Australia?  What are the cultural factors that influence their integration into, or alienation from, the Macquarie student body?

Very little qualitative research has been done on the higher education experience of international students in general, and yet they comprise a large minority of students at Macquarie.  Letting them speak in their own words about their experiences is an opportunity to learn about the pressures and problems that international students face, their goals and aspirations, and the social and learning strategies that they use to cope with a culturally new educational experience, which Macquarie University may be able to use to improve the experience of international students on campus.  It also has the potential to inform our understanding of the informal, affective, and social aspects of learning and intellectual development for international students.

I grounded this project in the principles of oral history methods, which specify that (1) the interview or transcript must be placed in a repository, and (2) those interviewed retain copyright and control over the use of their interviews.  It was therefore a complicated application, and probably the most closely scrutinised of all the projects I submitted, but it eventually received approval.

4) An applied anthropological study of the social use of space on campus and its relationship with ‘intellectual climate’

Macquarie University is looking for ways to improve its rankings in graduate student evaluations of “intellectual climate” on campus.  U@MQ is eager to think about new ways that the food and social facilities on campus could be restructured to be more appealing and better utilized.  Might these be linked?  Do students’ most formative moments at university happen inside or outside of the classroom?  How is social time in or outside of the classroom related to intellectual interaction?  To what extent is intellectual climate shaped by space and facilities?  What other factors shape the perception of intellectual climate on campus?  The aim of this project is to study use of space and evaluate whether there are any inexpensive or cost-effective interventions that you can recommend to improve the intellectual climate for students at Macquarie.

Here are some angles that you may consider:

1) In the library, how do students mark off spaces for individual and group work?  The library is the most formal learning space on campus.  How do students claim it to be more informal?

2) How much does home life influence use of public spaces on campus? Do students who use the campus do so to escape from home life for whatever reason?

3) Using the language of de Certeau, what are the tactics that students use to claim space and how does it differ from the ostensible ways that the space was designed to be used?

This particular project was set up as an applied anthropology project for a “client,” Macquarie University, and one organisation in particular, U@MQ, was very interested in the results and sponsored a competition and prize for the best student project.  (U@MQ is the company that provides non-academic services on campus — they run the coffee carts, the food court, the gym, etc.)  At the end of the semester, the students who did this research project presented their research results and policy recommendations to a panel from U@MQ, the Learning and Teaching Centre, and Facilities Management.

Protocols and scripts

In the ethics application for each project I had to set out the general research question and draft protocols – scripts actually – for students to follow in recruiting participants.  This was the only way that the ethics committee could feel satisfied that students wouldn’t put undue pressure on friends and family to participate in their research projects.  I also had to draft protocols for taking pictures, and several variations on informed consent forms and recruitment advertisements.  Students put their own spins on the research project and came up with their own lists of interview questions.  They submitted a short description of their own approach at the beginning of the semester and this received expedited review by the Ethics Secretariat.

So students in that same methods class the following year were able to either do their own research project (and go through the whole ethics approval process), OR they could take one of these 4 research projects and interpret it in their own way, while following the basic protocols and methodologies that I’d already gotten clearance for them to use.  Two did their own projects (one on roller derby leagues in Sydney and another on the Miss India-Australia beauty pageant); the rest of the class slotted into the projects I’d gotten pre-approval for.  With ethics approval mostly taken care of in advance, the students in 2008 were able to start their research right away.  We still had extensive discussions about research ethics, facilitated by the online ethics training module (see section 2 above), but this time students didn’t see research ethics as a tedious bureaucratic requirement, but rather as an area of intense current debate in anthropology.

They all did great work.  Most of them have submitted their papers to journals.  Several are under review, and so far one has been published (Elisabeth McLeod’s study of mobile phone use amongst Baby Boomers in Sydney in the International Journal of Emerging Technologies) and another was just accepted for publication (Vanessa Gamboa Gonzalez’s thought piece on conceptions of the body and health in Second Life for the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research). I’m over the moon about this. (I wish that I’d thought about my essays for class in graduate school as articles to submit for publication.  Then maybe I would have had more than 2 obscure publications when I finished my PhD.) These are the exciting possibilities when students are doing their own research instead of writing about the research of others.

–L.L. Wynn

I’ve been meaning to write about an ethics project I’ve been working on, and now someone else has beaten me to it! Serves me right for neglecting poor Culture Matters for three weeks. I’ll tell you about the project and then I’ll tell you who has scooped me with a critique of my own website.

It all started out because I teach a couple of methods classes and I ask my students to do their own independent research projects. This requires a bit of careful work to secure ethics clearance with our Human Research Ethics Committee. Another time I’ll write about that what that entails. Here I want to describe my solution for giving the students training in research ethics. It became apparent to me that our ethics committee would be more comfortable about the idea of undergraduate students launching into their own fieldwork if they were sure that they’d been trained in research ethics, so I had the idea that I could develop a set curricula to use with every class that I want to send “into the field.”

My inspiration, and nemesis, was the U.S. NIH ethics training module. I had to take it when I was a graduate student, and so I had only dim recollections of what it covered. My first thought was that I could use it as a starting point for my students, but when I went back to look at it, I was shocked at how inappropriate it was for training anthropologists in the ethical dilemmas of ethnographic fieldwork. Like most international ethics codes, its basic assumptions about research are grounded in a model of a clinical (mostly biomedical) encounter. Plus it was full of U.S. regulatory code. Ad nauseum.

So at first I thought, OK, it’s a government document so they would probably give me permission to adapt it for my own non-profit, educational use. I’ll just change a few things around, drop every mention of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and replace it with a reference to the Australian National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research, mention “ethnography” a few times, and add some stuff about Australian research.

But the more I played around with the idea, the more I thought it needed something completely new. I wrote an application for funding from a Macquarie University Learning and Teaching Fellowship and got money to support a one-year project with funding for some teaching relief and money to pay a research assistant and web programmers (thanks, Macquarie!). And I recruited two co-authors: Paul Mason, a PhD student here at Macquarie, and Kristina Everett, an anthropologist in Macquarie’s Department of Indigenous Studies / Warawara who helped develop the material on research in Indigenous Australian communities. Then the Macquarie Learning and Teaching Centre got involved and created the website and programmed it to offer an optional online quiz afterwards to assess comprehension of content, in case people wanted to use it in a class.

I won’t describe the entire module. It’s freely accessible so if you’re curious you can go have a look at it yourself (http://www.mq.edu.au/ethics_training). It is licensed under Creative Commons, meaning that anyone can use it or adapt it for their own purposes, as long as these are non-profit and attributed. So people can use it in their own classes, or use some of it as lecture slides, or they can take it and re-jig the entire thing according to their own perspective on research ethics.

Here I’ll just list some of the ethics issues that we decided to cover, some of the unique ethical dilemmas that can arise in ethnographic research but that rarely come up in clinical research.

Sex in the field

For the section on the ethics of sex in the field, Paul Mason produced a video interview with Julienne Corboz, an anthropologist who has researched BDSM communities

Here’s a classic dilemma that many fieldworkers face but which is unthinkable in clinical research. Paul drafted most of this section. Before going into the field, one of his research supervisors had given him this advice: “Don’t sleep with the locals.” At the same time, he was hearing from other staff in our department (ahem – I mean from me) that “everyone has sex in the field and half of anthropologists end up marrying ‘natives’.” (Of my cohort of 6 PhD students at Princeton, two married “natives” – and are still happily married, one came back with a long-term girlfriend, and another married no one but happily confesses to shagging through fieldwork!) So Paul was curious to explore this issue from the perspective of research ethics.

Oral vs written consent

A screenshot from the section of the module on oral vs. written consent

During participant observation, when should informed consent be written and when should it be oral? Anthropologists have often complained about ethics committees insisting on signed informed consent, even when it is entirely inappropriate, so I was delighted to find both disciplinary and national ethics codes that say clearly that written consent is not always possible or appropriate, even when your informants are literate.

Maintaining informed consent over years of fieldwork

A screenshot from the section on maintaining informed consent over time

How do you maintain informed consent over a long period of time? I illustrated this with an example from my own research: gossip, a small community, and I was pretty certain that when people told me about X’s affair with Y’s husband, they weren’t talking to me as an anthropologist but rather as a friend, and my own decision to not publish on this because it wasn’t clear to me that I was told such information under conditions of truly informed consent.  (Plus I couldn’t adequately disguise people’s identities in such a small community.)

Protecting informant identities in small communities

How do you protect informant identities without changing their identifying details so much that you have created fictional characters? This is a dilemma that many anthropologists have grappled with, and indeed, some have dealt with this problem by writing ethnographic fiction (like Laura Bohannan who published an “anthropological novel” under the nom de plume Elenore Smith Bowen, to protect her informants’ identities).

Researching people who commit crimes

Illustrations from the case studies

What are the ethical choices that you have to make when your research informants are engaged in felonies? I used examples from ethnographic sociologists: Sudhir Venkatesh, who wrote Gang Leader for a Day, and Laud Humphreys’ Tearoom Trade study.

The ethics of applied research / Human Terrain System

Applied anthropology: readers of Culture Matters will be familiar with my interest in controversy over the Human Terrain System, which has prompted the AAA to debate revising its code of ethics, particularly around the issue of applied anthropological research and the extent to which the results of commissioned research data are proprietary or should be in the public domain. It’s a perfect case study, in part because it’s so controversial – so much so that it’s prompting an entire national disciplinary association to redo its whole ethics code – and in part because it’s so recent, which serves as a reminder that ethics controversies aren’t just things that happened in the past (which is the impression you might get from reading some surveys of the history of ethics regulation).

Teaching ethics as debate, not consensus

When I first started this project, I had the idea that, since I was writing for an undergraduate audience, I needed to provide concrete advice and unambiguous solutions. The more I wrote and researched ethics, the more I realized that not only was this impossible, but it was an intellectually barren goal to set. Instead what I ended up doing was showing how much research ethics are contested, both within and across disciplines. That researchers come to completely different conclusions about whether it’s OK to be deceptive in your research, about what research collaboration should look like, and about whether anthropologists should deploy with an occupying army. That researchers had made grave ethics mistakes and yet had gone on to major academic careers because the insights gained through ethically dubious research were so important. In sum, that there was no triumphant, linear narrative of ethical enlightenment – that despite the international “creep” of ethics regulatory regimes and surveillance, research ethics scandals and controversies are unfolding as we speak.

Yet even as I described controversies and lack of consensus, each issue and case study raised is far more complicated than I could ever convey. Virtually every case study I provide gets simplified for the sake of narrative coherence. And even if I could, in a short training module, satisfy myself that I’d covered these issues thoroughly and with enough attention to the ethical complexities raised, I could never satisfy others. Just about everyone who has reviewed this site has pointed out key issues that are missing and should have been covered. In many areas, I see no consensus in how the issues should be covered. Here are some examples from when I asked people to review the section on research in Indigenous communities.

An illustration from the section of the module on research with Indigenous communities

Their critiques:

(1) Not enough Indigenous voices are represented.

(2) But if a non-Indigenous person adds Indigenous voices, it would only be coopting them to authorize colonial methodologies.

(3) We should show examples of research that is truly “decolonising” and collaborative, so that students have a positive model to work towards, rather than only negative models to work against.

(4) But if we present examples of research that is supposedly decolonising and collaborative, then we are reinscribing the enlightenment narrative that conveys the message that we are all marching triumphantly on the path towards egalitarian, ethical research; yet hierarchies and inequalities between researcher and researched – particularly when the researched are Aboriginal – are not going away anytime soon.

(5) We should include a discussion of the recent Howard government Intervention as a crisis that’s fundamentally generated by the ways that politicians uses and twists social science research to advance its own agendas. In so doing, we could avoid giving the impression that unethical interpretations and applications of research only happened in the past and show that this is in fact an ongoing dynamic that links contemporary research agendas with those that led to the Stolen Generation in the last century.

(6) We shouldn’t, as three white academics, think that we can criticize the Howard government Intervention to advance our own academic agendas – a lot of Aboriginal people are happy with the initial outcomes of the Intervention and we need to be patient before assessing its overall impact.

The simple (not to mention simplistic) point is that research ethics are and will always be contested. Of course, that’s not the impression given by ethics codes, which make the issues appear to be settled, even though the codes get revised every few years. To quote Tess Lea (whose 2008 ethnography Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts is fabulous – I’m going to review it here when I get the chance), “policy artefacts” are

fetish objects or magical relics that travel through time and space, often referring to each other and just as often ghost-written, that are attributed great expressive power and controlling capacities; a power acquired through ritualistic production efforts, including the careful addition of special words and consecration by anointed reviewers…. Well-worded strategies and well-formulated plans become talismans against an ever-present threat of intervention failure (2008:20).

Lea pushes the magic metaphor, but maybe a better analogy is between ethics codes and scripture. That’s mixing metaphors, but perhaps we’re being too cruel to magic – which is, after all, mysteriously efficacious – and we might do well to implicate religious faith and catechism as well. After all, religions are bureaucracies. Thinking of policy artefacts as scripture or formal documentation of sect doctrine, rather than just magical talismans, gives fuller meaning to another point that Lea makes, namely that ethics codes as policy artefacts are also scoreboards of relations of influence (Lea 2008:37, citing David Mosse). Perhaps that’s why we see both ethics codes and the NIH ethics training module organized primarily around clinical research contexts rather than ethnographic methods: we anthropologists are not powerful enough to shift their clinical orientation.

There is a handful of anthropologists and historians, including Rena Lederman, Jack Katz, Daniel Bradburd, Richard Shweder, and Zachary Schrag, who have recently started the important work of closely examining research ethics protocols and bureaucracies from ethnographic and historical perspectives, which is showing just how much variation there is in what is considered ethical and how differently it is applied and policed across countries, institutions, and disciplines.

It is Professor Schrag, in fact, who has scooped me with a critique of our ethics training module. He reviewed it at length on his Institutional Review Blog. He has some really nice things to say about it, and some potent critiques, too. Have a look and see what you think, and if you have your own feedback on the site, post a comment here or on the IRBlog or send it to lisa.wynn(/@/)mq.edu.au.

Next up, I’m going to post on my new idea for a research project on ethics…

–L.L. Wynn

This post has been removed at the request of the author.

Some sad news: Paula Lloyd, a social scientist on a Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan, was reportedly doused in gasoline and set on fire by a Taliban supporter.  According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lloyd was interviewing a man about gasoline prices when the man, who was carrying a container of gasoline,  doused her and lit her on fire.  Via Open Anthropology, a Reuters news report says that the Taliban claim that children were responsible for setting on fire and killing a “female soldier” when she was searching homes in Maiwand in the province of Kandahar.  Lloyd, however, is not dead; she was evacuated to a hospital with burns over 60% of her body.  Reuters also reports that another “U.S. civilian” shot dead the Afghani who set her on fire.

Here is a first post by PhD student Anne Monchamp. We are hoping that she will be heartened by this experience and will join us as a full-blown contributor.  JM.

Anthropologists do a lot of socializing.  I don’t just mean going for coffee or two hour lunches at the staff club, although that seems fairly prevalent at least in my case, I’m referring to fieldwork, a snazzy term for socializing; hanging out with people, telling stories, exchanging jokes, asking questions, etc.  This is the reason an article published this month in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, ‘Mental Exercising Through Simple Socializing,’ by Ybarra et al (2008) caught my eye.  The researchers suggest that socializing has benefits beyond ‘wellbeing’ including improved cognitive performance and memory retention.  Just to give you a snippet from their results section;

Study 1 showed that specific indicators of social interaction predicted cognitive performance among cognitively healthy participants and that this effect extends across a wide age spectrum, including the youngest participants. This study extended previous research with elderly and cognitively impaired populations. Study 2 followed up on these results by focusing on younger adults and the possibility that small amounts of social interaction can have causal effects on boosting cognitive performance. Compared to control participants, participants who interacted socially for 10 min showed better cognitive performance, performance equivalent to that displayed by participants engaged in so-called intellectual activities. The findings showing that younger adults can reap cognitive benefits from socializing expands our conceptions of the social interaction–cognition link. Not only do the results show that the effect is causal but that the process is very sensitive to small amounts of social interaction.

For the whole article see http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/34/2/248.pdf

While the research suggests socializing can have positive benefits not related to thesis/work avoidance it also points to the decline of social connectedness over the last few decades in the ‘west’ particularly the United States (e.g. see Putnam 2000 Bowling Alone).  The researchers suggest that a lack of socializing has effects on mental and physical health as well as being a factor in cognitive decline.  The article concludes by saying that social interaction not only ‘boosts’ cognitive performance but that socializing it necessary at every level of human thinking;

it may not be inappropriate to rephrase Descartes’ philosophical statement [I think therefore I am] as “I think about and with others, therefore I am.”

So even if anthropologists don’t really get a cognitive advantage from all our socializing at least other disciplines are recognising the importance of socializing in people’s lives, which I am sure anthropologists have been claiming all along.

Anne Monchamp