Ethical and Legal Issues

Saint Mary’s University researchers are governed by the Tri-Council Policy Statement:  Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans.  This document states that ethical research includes two components:

i)the selection and achievement of morally acceptable ends, and,

ii)the morally acceptable means to those ends.

The fundamental principles include respect for human dignity, vulnerable people, free and informed consent, privacy, confidentiality, justice and inclusiveness.  Ethical research minimizes harm and maximizes benefit.  All this should be accomplished using a "“subject-centred” approach that seeks to understand how the participants feel about being involved in the research. 

Free and Informed Consent

According to the Tri-Council guidelines, consent must be given voluntarily and should be in writing unless there are good reasons for not using this method.

Researchers should provide participants with “full and frank” disclosure.  Throughout the process the researcher must ensure that prospective subjects are given adequate opportunities to discuss and contemplate their participation.  This information should include:

n      an invitation to participate,

n      a statement of the research process, and

n      the nature of their participation, and of the process.

Participants also need to be informed of the foreseeable harms and benefits and informed that they are free not to participate.  For this research project we feel that the participants should also know about who will have access to the information and how the research results will be disseminated.  Only the researchers and their assistants will have access to the raw data (i.e., focus group notes, interview transcripts).

Please review the consent form that we will be using.

Privacy and Confidentiality

The interviews and focus groups that we conduct will not be anonymous, in so far as the interviewers/moderators will be able to associate information with particular respondents.  We will, however, protect the confidentiality of the interview data by avoiding any indentifiers in our notes and in particular, in our final report. 

Participants’ confidentiality will be ensured by confidentiality agreements that will be signed by all researchers, facilitators, recorders, assistants, or anyone else having access to the data (see attached forms).  Please have those at the training sign these. 

Justice and Inclusion in Research

This issue, as described by the Tri-Council guidelines, forms the basis of the principle of distributive justice and question the possibility of both exclusion and over-inclusion in research.  We must endeavor to ensure that our research does not systematically exclude any group that is under-represented in research.  This principle also suggests that we must be careful to avoid “over-inclusion” by studying groups who are often being researched and may either become stigmatized by this attention or bias research results.

Minimizing Harms and Maximizing Benefits

It is critical that research involving humans minimizes any potential harm and maximizes benefits to those who give us their time.

The participants in this research will benefit by having the opportunity to increase their awareness of the legal landscape relation to changing immigration policies and security laws.  It will also provide them with a forum in which they can air their complaints about the immigration and settlement process.

Legal Issues

There could be a very small chance of the police becoming interested in our data.  We have no obvious legal protection under the law.  This puts in an awkward position in terms of confidentiality guarantees. 

We have designed the research with the “Wigmore Test” in mind.  This legal test is described in several articles about this issue and has been used in Canada to protect a researcher at SFU from revealing his sources of information.  However, it is almost impossible to design research on national security related topics that will not easily pass this test.

We have opted to state in our consent form that we have an ethical obligation to maintain confidentiality.  We also intend to do everything possible to obscure participants identity (for example, we do not want to maintain lists of contacts).  Our best defense against police interest is anonymity of participants so that our information is of no use to them.  Please keep this in mind and steer conversations away from information that may be too sensitive. 

We had considered including a clause in our consent form that states this risk but these are two pitfalls to this approach.  Firstly, it could adversely affect the participants and make them nervous about what is a very small risk.  More importantly, however, several Canadian authors have suggested that this could be interpreted by the courts as a waiver of the right or presumption of confidentiality.

In this regard, it is also useful to note that the questions actually being asked are not ones that would be of much interest to the police.  Furthermore, the facilitators/interviewers should steer conversations away from information that could be used in an incriminating way.  People can, for example, refer to “someone they know" rather than use their names.