A bitter whinge about research ethics boards - anyone else?

[Catabogus]

Sorry this is just going to be a rant. Is it me or are ethics review boards getting worse? I swear they exist basically to prevent research being done.

I have just had my second research ethics clearance application rejected in 2 months (in social sciences). This one is to start a project that is externally funded, all booked, overseas and extremely time sensitive. The method is basically just a small longitudinal survey.

It came back today with a big old “reject”! There are over 20 comments about the ways in which it’s problematic.

I am a pretty experienced researcher who has been doing this kind of survey in the relevant countries for 15 years. I submitted an almost identical research application 3 years ago (exactly the same project design, just to be carried out in a different, neighbouring country) which was approved with no issue - indeed the comment from the reviewer then said the ethics strategy was extremely well thought-out.

So if this application now is horribly unethical, you would think we must certainly have been doing something dreadfully wrong in <neighbouring country> for the last 3 years too, surely?? Should I immediately call that project off? I mean, I get that there must have been a different reviewer on that application, but it can’t be meant to be so variable, can it?

I can’t avoid the (probably unfair) sense that the ethics panels are now mainly staffed by very inexperienced researchers who are determined to find problems where none exist. Some of the “problems” they identify don’t even have any obvious ethical relevance - eg that a different kind of new-fangled survey might be better, or that I haven’t included a particular area of [non-ethics-related] literature in my overview. How is this within their remit?

is it just me? Anyone else find this? It would be good to know I’m not alone in thinking something has gone very wrong with this process somewhere.

Edited to remove auto-correct!

It's not just you - it's just so much worse. I wonder if there is just intense anxiety over possible complaints/litigation. It's becoming impossible to do some of the smaller scale student projects that used to be common place - for example needing a full on help line for participants even though the questionnaires are not at all stressful. Yes - fiddling with the methodology - surely not in the remit. Full applications that surely just don't seem necessary from the start....

I haven't run into this problem at my uni, but I think we are very lucky. A colleague strategically volunteered to lead the ethics committee several years ago and put in place a bunch of sensible pragmatic guidelines which are still in effect and things work efficiently.

In the long term, that is the best solution for these things, and it can be done.

Oh well thank goodness it’s not just me! I dread to think how any ACTUAL sensitive or risky research gets done. Will we just have no projects on conflict or contested politics or terrorism or anything like that anymore?

And yes, it’s getting worse (and more time consuming) for students too. I keep seeing Master’s ethics applications sent back for totally spurious reasons.

It's not new to me - I was our dept ethics chair some decade ago and complained that the 'training' they gave was basically a bunch of scenarios that people then tried to think about - but no guidelines of things to look for, what is good practice/bad practice, etc. Just whatever people thought of.

I was the only person with any real ethics training on our dept ethics committee (although not a dept that usually did this - we had maybe 3-4 applications/year), and now I'm not on it and I try to make sure any things I do go through a colleague's committee because I have no confidence in our dept's.

The ethics committee in the uni where I work is made up of very experienced and sometimes eminent researchers, definitely not inexperienced people. I can see that they must vary a lot between institutions.
Ours often asks for amendments but outright rejection is extremely rare.

This sounds great. I wish ours were like this.

Technically mine is an R&R too. But it has SO many aspects to be changed, and it delay the project by so long (30 working days for a re-review) that the whole thing will be impossible. There’s a relevant event that is happening now - hence the timing of the funding - that the project relates to. Ugh.

I’m interested to hear that some people have departmental ethics committees. Ours is for the whole School (tens of departments) which means you get people in very different disciplines as reviewers sometimes.

Or totally unaware of the norms in the part of the world where you want to do the project - eg “why can’t illiterate people all just take part in an online questionnaire?” or “why can’t people in this authoritarian country sign their full names on a consent form?”

This one is to start a project that is externally funded, all booked, overseas and extremely time sensitive.

It didn't occur to you submit the ethics case before doing all the booking and grant applications etc?

The thing I hate about working in academic support is how academics leave critical tasks to the last minute and then complain.

I submitted the form in November! The project is to start the first week of March. You think that’s too late?

Funding wasn’t confirmed until late October. Then we had to design the survey.

You should have submitted the ethics form first before applying for funding. No point in getting money for something that won't pass ethics committee.

It clearly was too late because you are having problems now with insufficient time to resubmit. You assumed that you would get approval and didn't allow enough time to rewrite and resubmit.

When I get my car MOTed, I don't assume that it will pass first time. I don't plan an essential journey for the following day or even the day after because my car might need remedial work and that might need parts that take a couple of days to arrive. If I can plan like that for my car, you can plan like that for your ethics approvals.

Um…. how is that possible? I had no idea the call for funding was going to be released. It has to do with a specific event.

Also that was kind of my point - this SHOULD pass an ethics committee. I have an extremely similar project running in a neighbouring country, and I submitted an almost identical ethics application for that. It passed with glowing comments.

this SHOULD pass an ethics committee. I have an extremely similar project running in a neighbouring country, and I submitted an almost identical ethics application for that. It passed with glowing comments.

That depends on how different country X's laws are compared to country Y. A research project into gay culture in Spain would have wildly differing ethical implications from a similar project in Morocco because homosexuality is criminalised in Morocco. The two countries are neighbours, separated by a small distance of salt water. Same for abortion provider's experiences in Poland, where assisting a woman to abort is criminalised, versus Ukraine, where abortion is legal.

You’re right, of course, but I certainly would have mentioned had this been a case like that!

The “problems” my reviewer has raised are nothing to do with the specific countries at all. I do not get the sense s/he knew anything about the country I want to work in.

They are comments like:

• “Please provide additional justification for using a survey when there are many other approaches that could have been considered” (I have 2 pages on why a survey already)

• “Please review the literature on app-based and telephone-based surveys” (not relevant to my project as I don’t use an app-based or telephone survey!)

• “Please further justify collecting oral not written consent from each participant” (were the 3 pages on this not enough? The previous project reviewer said this was extremely well thought-out and evidence of an excellent level of ethical consideration!)

• “Please justify use of the term compensation instead of remuneration” (its all going to be translated anyway, as is clearly stated on the form- and it’s the same term in the local language!)

I’m all in favour of making research as ethical as possible (obviously!) but these feel like made up issues for the sake of having something to put on the form, no?

Yeah, that does seem OTT.

Sounds typical. I moved to another university at end of my career. I had a fully funded project (MRC) that was up and running, employing a post doc, collaborating with another site and producing papers. We worked on samples from healthy volunteers provided in return for £10. Others worked on samples obtained clinically.

New university, after offering me the job and crowing about how brilliant they (!) were to attract MRC funding in the local press, told me that it was unethical to pay volunteers.

I said that project had been fully funded by MRC who were fully aware where samples were coming from and how we got them. Reply was I couldn't "start" work until I had approval of local ethics board.

Ethical approval was rejected.

When I repeated that project was funded, running , employing lab staff at 3 sites in the UK (was 2 but I'd moved) I was then told that MRC must have "made a mistake" because paying volunteers in this was illegal!

I then phoned MRC, spoke to programme manager who said it was perfectly standard to pay a small amount for volunteers time and trouble, and was certainly not illegal.....

All in all it was a disaster, just got sick of dealing with idiots. We got enough work published so that final report looked OK, but the ethics committee at my last employer came very close to completely derailing a fully funded project. It was scandalous.

There was one particular aspect of that study which I was very excited about and was hoping would turn into quite a significant advance (endocrinolgy). We basically didn't have time to explore that properly.....so the sort answer is, we don't know!

I still think about it a decade later. The university in question is reputed to be very prestigious, and is very attractive to middle class students. One of its problems is that almost all of the admin staff are former students who either never left, or who drifted back a few years after graduation. They tend to just love the place and assume that it's one of the best universities in the world. They can do nothing wrong. I've also had experience of universities at the other end of the hierarchy too....my impression is that they were much better run and provided a better education.

People bringing projects in are the bane of my life because what was fine in the old institution isn't fine in mine and I didn't make the policies but it's somehow my problem to fix.

I strongly recommend against moving projects between institutions. It pisses off the academic who was made a promise at hiring time that can't be kept and it pisses off the support staff who are expected to somehow fix this mess.

I think it is inconsistency as well that is frustrating. It feels like a game of whac a mole. I sit on my faculty ethics board and chair students ethics for my department. I am also working on a research project on ethics so I do think about it a lot. Yet every time I put in a project, it feels like there is something else. With our students we are collating each set of reviews this year and offering more guidance.

I am a psychologist and I wish there were more stringent BPS guidelines on some things such as what to do in Internet mediated research if a participant leaves before the debrief, for example.

I also think that a lot of attention is paid to the wrong areas like GDPR rather than the ethics of dissemination which are also important.

There are also people who review too seriously the time wasting aspect of ethical decision making. Yes, poorly designed research is an ethical issue at the extreme but not at the calibre of most HEI researchers.

You should have submitted the ethics form first before applying for funding.

Can't get IRAS approval without institutional support and institution won't support unless you have at least 12 months funded on the project (contracts already signed, and they can take weeks to do that, too). The internal dept ethics approval won't be issued until after IRAS have approved. So... can't apply for any ethics before funding is in place.

I feel your pain, OP (deeply!!!). Our IRB also takes a "research governance" role, but very inconsistently. Sometimes quite critical, sometimes no hint they thought about the methods at all So we have to justify our statistical methods (which type of regression model...) as well as well as the ethics of what we do. They will probably move to insisting that we must have funding in place before we can apply too, soon, I mean, why wouldn't they impose that requirement since that is basic good research governance ?

@wacademia - that s not how it works

FWIW i don't hate anything linked to working with my PS colleagues, but i do resent a bit their sometime patronising take on how academic could do better, especially re time management, using examples that are just not relevant. Because, yep, you should not apply for ethics before getting the funding.

OP - we rarely have this here, because colleagues on our board run biomed research and are pragmatic. Can you appeal to the head of the ethics board on ground of comments being unreasonable?

It’s a bloody nightmare. Too tired to type out a long reply. The process is too long and onerous to work with modern research timescales.

Ugh. We have a new chair on the ethics committee. It's a university wide committee so you will have people reviewing who know nothing about the topic.

I recently got some internal funding for some educational equipment. I had to come up with some form of research plan to justify the funding. All fine, do a quick study to assess student attitudes towards using the equipment. Nothing sensitive or controversial.

The hoops we had to jump through were shocking. You would think we were injecting them with experimental drugs. We have now re-written it to include the justification for why we decided to do the study (that is really none of their business), the measures in place to deal with students who may suffer distress, our plan for handling sensitive data (there is none, it's a few bloody likert scales about the equipment) and all the rest of the unnecessary nonsense.

I wouldn't mind but I thought it would be a nice change to do a bit of pedagogic research and that it would be fun and beneficial to the students to have access to the equipment.

I am the Chair of a social sciences ethics committee and I think we do things well, based on the experiences here. I am responsible for around 150 faculty and PGRs.

OP, if you’re getting inconsistent feedback between projects then the committee needs to calibrate reviewers’ feedback better. We put three reviewers on most applications and rotate the teams for this reason.

Personally I think younger academics are an asset - I can mould them in my (pragmatic) image. Senior academics often won’t adapt as easily.

Risk tolerance is a cultural thing and has to be established and then maintained, or it will be undercut by overzealousness. We have a high tolerance for risk, which I have embedded in our mission and values as a research institute, our REF goals and our commercial competitiveness. Basically I’ve made it as unattractive as possible for people to dismantle it.

Also, of course incentives/remuneration/compensation is fine. Why should research participants subsidise the work of a huge institution like a university by giving their time for free and covering their own subsistence costs?

I forgot to say, in our institution we do not accept applications before the funding is secured. We bid heavily and secure around 1 in 5 projects - why on earth would I want to facilitate reviews on the 4 unsuccessful ones? Terribly inefficient.

We do a lot of fast turnaround work (humanitarian needs type stuff). We can turn urgent ethics applications around in 5 days if needed, as long as the candidate is responsive to feedback.

Our committee is also on a constant charm offensive, to hopefully avoid the sense of alienation some people sadly feel here. We put on lots of ethics talks and training events, so people see us as more than just a compliance function. We have an inbox for questions, meet one to one to discuss applications before submission if needed, and we’re always trying to streamline processes too.

@cowskeepingmeupatnight sounds like you are doing an amazing job!