The questions of ethics in collaborative research

Abstract

In Australian universities, research involving human participants must gain clearance from the institution’s ethics committee or review board before data collection begins. The granting of ethics approval suggests that the planned research activities are ethical and that they will be conducted in an ethical manner. However, the operations of ethics committees tend to be based on the assumption that the research participants will be strangers to the researchers. Whilst ethics guidelines generally focus on procedural and situational issues, they do not usually address the important issue of relational ethics (Ellis, 2007). This dimension of ethics becomes crucially important in research projects that are conducted in teams. What ethical principles might apply to researchers collaborating on a research project, not only in terms of relationships with the participants, but in terms of relationships amongst the researchers themselves? Reflecting on the authors’ experiences of team research and the types of questions that presented, this chapter investigates the importance of relational ethics as it applies to collaborative research in education.