Ethics Review: Practical Suggestions for Enabling Inclusive Computer Science Research

—People make and use tools. Many information technology tools, applying computer science research, powerfully influence human behaviour. Some questions about human behaviour can be answered with quantitative research methods. Other questions require qualitative approaches. Protections for people affected by research are provided in Law and more recently in research administration processes and procedures. Different research questions are indicative of different research processes and have different outcomes. Ethics committees’ scrutiny of research proposals provides a means of giving effect to concerns over the impact of research processes on people. Tensions arise from unreflective and aggregate treatment of proposals for human research. Ethical review processes and procedures can bring about unintended inhibiting effects for researchers by failing to accommodate for disciplinary and paradigmatic differences in theory, questions, methodologies and research contexts. The sources of...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: WCE
• Authors: Robert H. Barbour
• Keywords: Human Behaviour, Research, Research Processes, WCE 2007, WCE 2008