Establishing the SRA Ethics Forum

[John Wicks]

This is the text of a document first published in SRA News.

Ever since the SRA released the updated ethical guidelines in 2003 we have been intermittently receiving requests for guidance and advice on ethical matters. So far we have not established any formal system and have responded to these requests on a rather ad hoc basis. Our role has never been to set up systems of ethical scrutiny, rather to offer support for researchers facing ethical dilemmas but who may lack the benefit of immediate collegial or line managerial expertise. In fact, as SRA members will remember, we have continued to treat the ethical guidelines as educative and informative instead of the sanctionable “code” approach favoured by many other professional associations.

Given the constantly changing nature of the research landscape and the continuing and growing need to maintain awareness of the ethical implications of social research, we felt that this was the time for the SRA to offer something a little more systematic; hence the proposal for setting up an “Ethics Forum”.

We plan for the forum to operate in a ‘virtual’ capacity – receiving requests for information and advice by e-mail (with a guarantee of anonymity if this is sought). We will then circulate the “problem” around members of the forum for each to offer comment which will then be fed back to the enquirer. As with all ethical queries there are bound to be differences of opinion and the enquirer may have to choose from a range of proposed options.

The important point is that the forum will be constituted from amongst senior members of the SRA who will have had considerable combined experience of social research across the different sectors. Indeed they are likely to have had a variety of ethical dilemmas of their own to confront and resolve over the years.

To illustrate, we have received requests for advice about aspects of research with children, about claims to ownership of original data, and about researchers’ responsibility to their line managers or to their conscience. There have been issues of intellectual property rights and the consequences of disseminating potentially unpalatable research findings. To be expected there have been many requests for negotiating the increasingly labyrinthine nature of emergent ethical scrutiny procedures. Both the health and social care ethical review systems continue to grow and change; and the higher education ethical review systems – previously non-existent in some institutions – have been created or modified to meet the new demands of the research councils.

The queries have come from all sectors – academic, government, independent research organisations and individual (own account) researchers. We have been able to turn around the response within a few days – at most a week – and this is something we would still attempt to do as well as broadening the advice base to all members of the forum.

We plan, with enquirers’ permission, to place some of the queries and our proposed resolution in the form of anonymised “case studies” on the SRA website. We will never claim our responses to be definitive, rather our views of the best choices to make given the problem.

The Ethical Forum will liaise with the SRA Executive without formally “reporting” to it since the advice offered must be seen as independent of the SRA’s formal structures. Thus it is, essentially, a group peer mentoring opportunity. The recommendations can only have the status of the collective opinions of the members of the Forum. Ultimately the steps taken to resolve any ethical problem must be taken by the enquirer – although it may help to be able to justify those steps in light of experienced judgement provided by a significant professional association.

In the interests of ensuring diversity of opinion and promoting the need to face ethical challenges amongst the SRA constituency we propose some rotation of the Forum membership every couple of years. So we look forward to offers to participate in the Forum and to receiving some interesting enquiries.


Ron Iphofen
Convenor of the SRA Ethical Forum