A critique of current practice: ten foundational guidelines for autoethnographers.

Any research is potentially compromised when researchers address ethical issues retrospectively rather than by anticipating these issues. In this regard, creative analytical practices (CAP) autoethnography has endemic problems. In Part 1 of this article, I detail a case study of an autoethnography in which journal reviewers insisted that an author gain retrospective informed consent from the 23 persons documented in an autoethnography. Yet the journal reviewers' insistence failed to go one step further-acknowledging that a conflict of interest develops when gaining consent retrospectively. In Part 2, I contrast three leading autoethnographers' justifications for not gaining informed consent with the Position Statement on Qualitative Research developed by successive Congresses of Qualitative Inquiry. In Part 3, I identify resources available for autoethnographers, including ethical issues present when researchers use autoethnography to heal themselves, violating the internal confidentiality of relational others. In Part 4, I question if autoethnography is research and, like journalism, exempt from formal ethics review. Throughout the article, 10 foundational ethical considerations for autoethnographers are developed, taking autoethnographers beyond procedural ethics and providing tools for their ethics in practice.

Number-8-wire ethics: a New Zealand ethics committee's response to lengthy international clinical trial information sheets.

USA dominance of international clinical trials mandates complex and lengthy participant information sheets and limits the amount of scrutiny New Zealand ethics committees can have over information sheets form or content. This paper provides an alternative exemplar: a summary of a lengthy participant information sheet written in less than one page, inviting potential participants to read the lengthy document. The succinct invitation provides participants with sufficient information to decline to read the lengthy document or better informs the reading of the longer document. Equally, the one-page letter permits New Zealand ethics committees, researchers, study coordinators, and Maori consultation groups to comment and alter the informed consent process without compromising rigid FDA prescriptions for clinical trial research.

If Ethics Committees were Designed for Ethnography.

WHERE DID THE ETHICS REVIEW PROCESS go wrong for qualitative research, and how can we make it right, or at least better? This paper begins with an excerpt from an ethnography of attempting to attend an ethics review-related workshop, which exemplifies that the ethics-review process is based on epistemological assumptions aligned with positivistic research, and does not fit the qualitative research process. We suggest that a new format for ethics review, based on assumptions associated with qualitative research and ethnography, might be a better fit. In this model the researcher becomes the expert and the committee the learner or ethnographer. In this process the ethics review process is guided by four core open-ended questions that facilitate a fuller and richer exchange of information. The second part of this paper presents strategies that may lessen the risks associated with the unknown or emergent aspects of qualitative research. These strategies include a dual consent process and the co-opting of journal editors or thesis review boards to review ethical considerations prior to publication or sign off, and a renewed focus of ethics training.

Unequal protection for patient rights: the divide between university and health ethics committees.

Despite recommendations from the Cartwright Report ethical review by health ethics committees has continued in New Zealand without health practitioners ever having to acknowledge their dual roles as health practitioners researching their own patients. On the other hand, universities explicitly identify doctor/research-patient relations as potentially raising conflict of role issues. This stems from the acknowledgement within the university sector itself that lecturer/research-student relations are fraught with such conflicts. Although similar unequal relationships are seen to exist between health resarchers and their patients, the patient/subjects are not afforded the levels of protection that are afforded student/subjects. In this paper we argue that the difference between universities and health research is a result of the failure of the Operational Standard Code for Ethics Committees to explicitly acknowledge the vulnerability of the patient and conflict of interests in the dual roles of health practitioner/researcher. We end the paper recommending the Ministry of Health consider the rewriting of the Operational Standard Code for Ethics Committees, in particular in the rewriting of section 26 of the Operational Standard Code for Ethics Committees. We also identify the value of comparative ethical review and suggest the New Zealand's Health Research Council's trilateral relationship with Australia's NHMRC (National Health and Medical Research Council) and Canada's CIHR (Canadian Institute of Health Research) as a useful starting point for such a process.

Informing consent in New Zealand research: researchers' conflict of interest and patient vulnerability.

The authors, members of two different regional health ethics committees, write about their observations evaluating ethics application where researchers' conflicts of interest go unacknowledged either when researching their own patients or when the research subjects experience a temporary vulnerability--i.e. they have learned they are to lose a body part such as a breast, bowel, or limb. Currently the operational standard code of ethics does not address either issue even when New Zealand health ethics had its origins at National Women's Hospital where a physician researched his own patients. Under this situation the researcher's conflict of role undermined informed consent. The paper ends rewriting Section 26 of the Operational Standard.