This University is licensed to be a research institution and we get our licence by meeting
a number of obligations. We need to have a process in place which we have. We need to
have a research ethics committee which we have. We need to require our researchers to
apply for research ethics of approval, and they do it through a process which is formalised
and acknowledged by the Federal Government. We need to report on that every year and every
year I get a letter saying thank you very much for your report, you’re meeting all
the obligations and we allow you to continue being a research institution. Last year we
had an interesting response. We have tried to be as honest as we can and we do acknowledge
to them if we have an issue. We had an issue with compliance and they acknowledged that
we had issue but they also acknowledged that we were doing something satisfactory about
it and yes you can continue being a research institution.
So that’s quite a high order obligation and you can see where the groundwork obligations
sit with you as academics and as students as, members of the University having an obligation
to apply for ethics approval, for us to have a process, a committee that then reviews against
the standards and authorises that approval. And when we meet that kind of compliance process
as we do then we’re allowed as an institution to continue doing our research. It’s when
we breech that, that we put that at risk. I don’t know of any institution in Australia
that has been suspended but it is entirely possible. It’s more likely that we have
an area of research that misbehaves itself for some reason or another and that we are
asked to stop conducting that research. That’s more likely to happen internally. But it hasn’t
happened yet so we’re all very well behaved.
There are a couple of guiding documents and if you haven’t seen the National Statement
on the Ethical Conduct of Human Research, your homework tonight is to go and download
it. It’s a free download, it’s easy reading. It gets reviewed periodically. It used to
be a five year review of the whole thing. The National Health Medical Research Counsel
who manage it, are on a rolling review so when issues have to be updated as, for example,
the world of stem cell research is evolving really quickly so the ethical parameters around
it are evolving. They’ll be updating it so when you need it go in an download the
most recent version of it, and what I’d ask you to do if you haven’t done so is
have a browse through it, read most especially the first couple of chapters because that
sets the definitions and it talks about the principles.
Even if you don’t ever end up doing a human research ethics application, it’s actually
a really powerful statement about what makes good research. And if you follow the principles
in there you will design your projects and your programs to work as well as they possibly
can. We can’t guarantee they will work, but you can actually minimise the trip wires
that inevitably turn up in research and if we can do that then we’re well ahead.
The Australian Code for Responsible Conduct for Research is a somewhat larger document
but it’s again one that all researchers should know about, should probably have a
look through, lots of more detailed advice on lots of areas of how to plan, implement,
design, put into practice research in a way which is ethically sound, is practically sound.
The bottom line with both of these documents is that what we want to do is to able to ask
research that is useful and meaningful, it has merit. We don’t want to ask the sort
of trivial stuff that the rag trade magazines. You know what’s the proportion of men that
wear red ties, yeah, not really much worth asking, we don’t dust that as scholars,
or maybe we do for a cultural theorist, but you know mostly we wouldn’t. We need to
ask sensible, deep, useful questions that will do something useful for our society.
We need to design it in sound and rigorous ways that are recognised by our individual
scholarly communities. So within our disciplines what is the methodology that is validated
that been shown to be sound and can we design it in a way which will work? And I say to
people how do we know it will work, whether to work with the best guess, it will generate
data which is sound and sensible and rigorous and in itself is got a reasonably good chance
of actually answering our questions with sensible answers. That’s as good as we can get.
We have to remember we have a responsibility, a public responsibility, as a public university.
Our results however obscure they may sometimes seem and we wonder whether anybody ever reads
them, potentially have the capacity to influence public debate, influence public policy and
practice. If we are doing teaching and learning research it may be that something that we
do will influence the next generation of how school curricular are designed if we get it
well, we’re going to make a positive contribution. If we get it wrong we have a potentially huge
amount of damage. Public policy based on shoddy researcher can be bad public policy. It could
be a lot of money, it could be a lot of grief attached to that if we get it wrong.
So this is what this is trying to do, is help you make sure the research you do is as sound
and solid, has got as good a chance of actually achieving something sensible at the end. Now
what we can’t do is actually guarantee it will work. So the defence that I’ve seen
from one PhD student is: Ah, but why have they failed me because you gave me ethics
approval, it must be good. Anyway there’s a little bit obligation there but those two
documents if you haven’t seen them get hold of them, be aware of them.