Research for social impact and the contra-ethic of national frameworks

Abstract

Iteration is a factor of the human research ethical clearance through which research and evaluation with humans is undertaken in Australia. In remote community research contexts, iteration has helped us to redress some features of the cultural dissonance that occurs between western and Aboriginal research paradigms and between remote and urban contexts. Without a commensurate ethic of feedback between national programs and remote research settings, the uptake or non-uptake of findings from short-term or rapid-contract research often remain a mystery. The proposition this paper puts forward is for a post-research process whereby research commissioners and administrators provide feedback as to the uptake or not of research findings. This would produce a meta-data, as well as make accessible the rationale for research findings being accepted or rejected. The meta-data would provide baselines for further research, an ongoing record of areas of research and neglect, and assist in the uptake of research knowledge useful at a community level. However, this proposition would require non-partisan support which is highly unlikely to be realised in the current political climate. human research Ethics: Protocols, procedures and practices Despite being intensely researched, remote Aboriginal community residents’ outcomes for health, education, employment, wellbeing and safety fall below the set targets of Australian governments (Australian Government, 2016; Limerick et al., 2014). Evidently, research and evaluation contribute knowledge for the governance and provision of public services, but what knowledge, and how and why, is unclear. There is no formal requirement or system of feedback from research commissioners to research institutions, researchers or community research partners. With so much information and knowledge being produced, what else can human research ethical protocols contribute towards improving remote Aboriginal community outcomes? All research undertaken in Australia that includes people requires an ethical clearance, which is managed through a university or a government department. A human research ethics committee (HREC) grants a research project clearance when adequate ethical processes and oversight for the research are accepted by the committee. Procedural ethics and ethical practice together describe the process of ethical research and the terms are commonly understood as iteratively linked (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004). A principal of human research ethics is that research contribute to knowledge that achieves a greater social good. Producing findings through remote Aboriginal community research and evaluation is not enough, despite community-level priorities and the direct benefits of employment, participation and income from community research contract work. The social context of the current policy era has 93 Learning Communities | Special Issue: Ethical relationships, ethical research in Aboriginal contexts | Number 23 – November 2018 been described as “governance by program” (Sulkunen, 2008, p. 75). An era in which policy increasingly frames public services such as welfare as programs, such as active welfare, shaping the relationship between the participant and the state as a contract (Whiteford, 2015). In such an era, if the ethic of social good is to be retained as an ethical principle then recommendations from Aboriginal community research about remote services must inform policy and program designs, and the rationale of such evidence-based policy determination made transparent. Australian Aboriginal people have been the most researched group on the continent to date (Martin & Mirraboopa, 2003) and human research ethical protocols have been further adapted from those developed alongside medical advances that used western and medical scientific models. Since the 1990s several reviews have sought to strengthen Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ethical research protocols (Dunbar & Scrimgeour, 2017). The result is that all research which includes Aboriginal participation requires a high-level, formal, ethical clearance in a process which is reviewed by an Indigenous HREC sub-committee, to ensure that Indigenous ethical concerns reflected in the national framework are addressed within the research design (Dunbar & Scrimgeour, 2017). The national ethical protocols seek to redress cultural dissonance in relation to the Aboriginal health sector (Dunbar & Scrimgeour, 2017; Martin & Mirraboopa, 2003), educational sector (Nakata, 2007; Nakata, Nakata, Keech, & Bolt, 2012), and in the legal interpretation of cultural and intellectual property (Janke, Pitt, & Herborn, 2013; Orr et al., 2009). The process of Aboriginal community research in remote settings relies on navigating intersectional power structures and cultural dissonances to undertake practicable and ethical studies. As Kelly et al. (2012) have also observed, research embedded in Aboriginal community participation faces an additional disjunction between what local ethical research entails and the requirements of the contracting clients or other stakeholders that manage, commission or fund the research within the relevant national frameworks for ethics and policy. Considering the diversity between remote settings, there is scope for ethical protocols that further redress cultural dissonance through research partnerships at the community level. At this level research is likely to encounter culturally distinct and fine-grained diversity within community settings as well as between them. The national ethical protocols are intended to maintain the rights of Aboriginal people to self-determine and to project their community and cultural values; but within them, the distinctions of language, culture and geography and the politics of identity are often indiscernible within settings or between them. This reduces the likelihood of the intended values, such as self-determination, being preserved through the national framework. Unless time and money is available for the necessary discussion towards a better understanding of how the research will include and represent a community’s value of, and priorities for, self-determination, community level data is unlikely to result in community priority outcomes for local services. One benefit of Indigenous research knowledge and ethical protocols for non-Indigenous coresearchers is as a process through which the researcher comes to better understand her own involvement with research among collaborators who have an Aboriginal cultural knowledge base, and how this intersects with the espoused and practical human ethical research values.1 Field research of remote public service provision with remote community participation is a conduit of information and knowledge about intersectionality, and it highlights the cultural and geographic dissonance that is implicit within the implementation of national frameworks in contemporary remote Aboriginal societies (Austin-Broos, 2001). 1 For more detail about the Indigenous values and ethics requirements for ethical research with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people see Dunbar and Scrimgeour (2017, pp. 64–65); the National Statement (2003, pp. 69–71); and AIATIS Guidelines, (2012, pp. 4–18). 94 Research for social impact and the contra-ethic of national frameworks | Judith Lovell At the national level, the ethical academic research process is designed so that practice and procedure will ideally inform one another (Guillemin et al., 2016). This iteration of practice, method and procedure is inherent in the design of the human research ethical clearance process. For some research participants, discussing the core values2 specific to Aboriginal ethical research protocols in the process of obtaining their informed consent was found to be extremely important. In a longitudinal study those conversations shaped the Informed Consent instruments over time and increased the participation rate in health research described (Dunbar & Scrimgeour, 2017; Guillemin et al., 2016). But does the imposition of the national framework also reduce the ways that local communities can become engaged in shaping their own ethical research? In another setting and a different research context, the point at which informed consent occurs between Aboriginal participants and co-researchers is less methodically and procedurally reached; in fact the recommended use of the protocol for informed consent can disrupt the research. Paperwork, signatures and formalised records of meetings between outsiders and community elders seldom foster trust, collaboration or participation in remote contexts unless there is a significantly well established relationship (Judd, 2017). There is a point along the trajectory of participation when inter-personal and inter-cultural understandings of one another’s roles and of the potential and intent of the work is established, through which the local priorities for the research are determined and “owned” (Lovell, Armstrong, Inkamala, Lechleitner, & Fisher, 2012). Participatory Action Research (PAR) (Wadsworth, 2011) is a method of communityand actiondriven research which theoretically seeks to broker mechanisms that result in communitylevel engagement and change. In two cases of remote Aboriginal community research (Lovell, 2017; Lovell et al., 2012) conversational dialogue formed a core function of the research team. With iterative processes embedded into the methodology, the research findings and recommendations could identify and disclose local priorities for safety and wellbeing. The uptake of findings is a mystery: a service provider will have a different rationale than a community member for wanting outcomes; a stakeholder will have a different timeframe and impulse for investing or not in recommendations. Those differences should not be enough to prevent disclosure back to the researchers and community involved. Not all research undertaken in remote Aboriginal communitie