The joys of ethics

My "elephant" is a thing called a 'coffee shop conversation'. It's a great public consultation method being developed by Barod. The only problem is that none of us in Barod are quite sure what it is, how to describe it or why it seems to work so well.

I'm planning to climb all over the elephant to get the best idea I can of what it is. But even that isn't going to really work. I need a few more elephant climbers to give their perspective and description of the elephant. That led me to a wierd and wonderful research approach called "collaborative analytic autoethnography". ie, a bunch of us all get introduced to the elephant, look at the elephant individually, then compare notes and see what happens.

I wrote a lovely information pack for "potential research participants" (aka "the rest of the bunch of us").

Challenge 1: our relationship will be both researcher/research participant and coresearchers. The relationship will fluctuate during the time we are working together. That's fun to explain to the ethics committee, but fortunately we have found a way to explain it that is clear and transparent and deals with some of the ethics process issues (like how can you assure anonimity to your research participant when you are going to invite them to coauthor a paper?)

Challenge 2: I have to include lots of information for my potential research participants. So I wrote my lovely information pack, including everything I thought I needed to tell people and everything the university thought I needed to tell people [not always the same]. It went through a few academic checks, and found a wording that should have been fine for the ethics committee. Then I took it to show a potential research participant...

Guess what? The things I wanted to tell people weren't the same as the things people wanted to know.

That shouldn't have surprised me. We in Barod specialise in helping people communicate information to each other, particularly when it's the Establishment wanting to communicate with Jo Bloggs.

But somehow, I'd switched on my "researcher head" and forgotten all that. I just read the ethics handbook, looked at my protocol and plugged away to do what was needed according to the handbook.

So, this afternoon's task is to completely redraft my information pack so I tell people what they want to know before commiting - without leaving out the things I have to tell them even if they think they don't want to know them.