Ethical and Epistemic Issues in Equity-Oriented Collaborative Research: Challenges for University Leadership of Public Deliberation

• In Event: University Leadership in Creating Equity-Oriented Communities of Expertise: Ethical, Epistemic, and Efficacy Issues

Abstract

This paper focuses on some central ethical and epistemic issues that arise in building equity-oriented collaborative research projects that involve university researchers, community partners, and policy makers. It delineates the experience of a University of California multi-campus research program initiative, the Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitable California (CCREC).

CCREC undertook an extensive review of the research literature in the social sciences, public health, and ethics to identify ethical issues that arise in conducting collaborative research (participatory action research, community-based research, collaborative research, and/or engaged scholarship) and then reviewed more than fifty existing codes of ethics to ascertain the degree to which those issues were addressed. Ethical codes were reviewed beginning with the foundational Belmont Report, and included those of the National Institutes of Health, Institutional Review Boards for the Protection of Human Subjects, the leading associations in the social and health sciences, as well as a dozen codes of ethics promulgated by various indigenous communities throughout the world. A number of gaps were identified, some of which also had bearing on the epistemic aspects of research.

Among the core ethical questions that need to be clarified in order to provide guidance and warranted standards for researchers are:
o Informed Consent: how does informed consent get assured when the ‘subject’ of the research is not an individual, but a community, itself divided in multiple ways?
o Anonymity and Confidentiality: how can anonymity and confidentiality be assured when communities are studying themselves, and when new media technologies are utilized in recording and disseminating findings?
o Respect and Power: how do power differentials across a variety of differences that are prominent in university-community collaborations (related to class, race, gender, level of formal education, and access to social, economic and political resources) effect the establishment and maintenance of respectful working relationships?
o Advocacy: how can collaborative research be geared into policy, community, and organizational change for equity without becoming partisan, and how should researchers and universities regard the harms (for some) that may occur in processes of change?

Epistemic issues intersect with these ethical issues particularly in relation to the matters of respect and power, and to advocacy. Universities and researchers adhere to rigorous peer-reviewed standards for establishing truth, shape their research questions from published literature, and follow prescribed methodologies for conducting the research, compiling the findings, and interpreting their significance. The research and the researchers are presumed to be neutral, unbiased, observers and reporters. However, problem-based collaborative research arises from messier contexts, is not necessarily aimed at peer-reviewed publication, and includes ‘non-expert’ collaborators whose own modes of knowledge must be respected and who generally have a vested interest in the outcome of the research. Moreover, equity-oriented collaborative research does not position itself as neutral in the policy arena, a context further muddled because it is a discursive space in which truth does not necessarily matter.

This essay examines the nexus of these issues in the context of implementing a new state-wide research program initiative.

Author

• Ronald David Glass, University of California - Santa Cruz