I received notification this week that my PhD was awarded on 24 August, so now seems a good time to reflect on the ethical choices of my journey up to this point and consider plans for the future, from an ethical and personal values perspective.
In the examiners’ report following my viva I was asked to include a few sentences to highlight the ethical steps I actually took during the research. I interpreted this to focus on the interview process with my older adult participants and updated the section (3.8 Ethical and risk considerations) accordingly. At the back of my mind, however, was the broader interpretation of ethics in research, from the germination of an idea to ethics committee approval for the proposal, and onwards to the research itself, culminating in the presentation of the thesis. I have previously shared my experiences of striving to make my academic writing accessible (see https://sandraflynn.com/?s=accessibility), to me another aspect of ethical research practice, so for now I will focus on my journey towards an ethical PhD thesis, and key learnings along the way.
As a research supervisor of MSc students, whenever asked about changing elements of a student’s proposal my response is always a question, ‘well, what did you receive ethics approval for?’ On occasion the proposed change requires a review and decision by the ethics committee, but for the most part the student decides to proceed with the research as originally approved. In Spring 2021, I diligently completed my own PhD research ethics application, taking time over decisions such as whether or not I should submit my dataset in an open access repository for potential use by other researchers in the future (the answer was yes); or what possible discomfort my questions might cause participants, to which I answered ‘no discomfort, inconvenience or danger is anticipated by participating in this study’. I also added a provision outlining what I would do in the event of this scenario arising. In due course approval was granted and I proceeded with my research.
During this time I was also working on a paper from an earlier module, my first as a solo author. I was in a fortunate position to have it published open access through an arrangement with my university library, but my dilemma involved deciding whether or not to attach the dataset to the journal publication since I had ethics approval for my thesis to conduct a further in-depth analysis of that dataset from the earlier module. It seemed that every time I logged onto the publisher’s author portal I was asked whether I wanted to attach a dataset. In the end I decided not to do this and later deposited the module dataset, along with my thesis dataset in my university repository.
A couple of key learnings arose for me as a result of this process. First, that having made the decision to make my dataset available as open access and stated this in my ethics application, I then had to carry it through, particularly as there was no reason not to, such as sensitive data that participants might have shared with me during the semi-structured interviews. Second, by making my work, both inputs (data) and outputs (publications), open access, I had to get up to speed on creative commons licences and choosing one most suitable for my requirements. In earlier papers that I co-authored that were published open access, the choice of licence was as I recall, decided upon by the publisher. Resources from the National Forum for Teaching and Learning in Ireland and Creative Commons were most useful to aid the decision-making process. Ultimately, I chose the option to share alike for non-commercial purposes.
Readers might be forgiven for thinking that in this post I started off talking about ethics, and somehow veered off to open access publishing – well spotted! For me though, central to my research is enabling anyone who wishes to read it to do so without incurring an individual cost. I consider it an ethical choice, and the challenge of funding the article processing charge required by the journals I hope to publish in, becomes more real in the event of not being affiliated to a university in the future. I believe there is a close relationship between the ethics of research practice and my personal values. When something is the right thing to do, a way forward will be found.
Until next time, Dr Sandra!
Datasets:
Flynn, S. (2020). Survey data collected from young adults in Ireland September-October 2020. https://doi.org/10.17635/lancaster/researchdata/628
Flynn, S. (2021). Survey and interview data collected from older adults in Ireland July-October 2021. https://doi.org/10.17635/lancaster/researchdata/624
Sandra Flynn 