The University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development is organizing a conference on the Ethics and Politics of Research with Immigrant Populations. See the link for more information.

The most recent edition of Anthropology News features articles on codifying ethics. Much here is of relevance to linguists (and the LSA is mentioned a few times in the articles). The articles are available online and comments can be made via the AAA blog.

Nancy Dorian’s paper at the recent University of Hawaii meeting on language documentation and conservation is now available as a podcast. (Link opens in a new window.) From the site:

In the documentation of endangered languages a researcher’s responsibility to scholarship, to the sources who supplied the material, and to the study community overall may be in conflict. The opposing ethical claims of such responsibilities are discussed in the light of long field experience with a variety of Scottish Gaelic.
The presentation at the conference was made by Pamela Innes reading Nancy Dorian’s paper.

Periodically I’ll do a review of the search terms people are using to find this blog.

Currently, the search terms are clustered in two areas: the LSA ethics statement itself, and ethical case studies. For the first, you’ve come to the right place! For the second, we’re aiming to include more case studies over the coming year.

The LSA’s ethics committee recently received a request to produce a plain English version of the statement which explains the more technical language for non-native speakers of English. We will be tackling this section by section over the coming weeks.The format will be the same for each post: the statement language will be in italics, and comments on it will be underneath. The comments rephrase the statement and sometimes provide some amplification. Note that this is my [CB's] interpretation and not that of the committee as a whole.

Here’s the introduction:

1. Introduction.

Linguists work in a variety of settings and approach the study of language from
multiple disciplinary perspectives. Each setting presents its own set of potential
ethical dilemmas.

Linguists do many different things as part of their work. They work in many parts of the world, in many cultures, and with many different people. Linguistics is also very broad; it includes experiments, observation (e.g. taking notes about what people say), asking questions, and other things. Because of this, it is difficult to write down beforehand all the different ways that linguists might need to think about ethics (but there are lots of them).

It is the responsibility of linguists individually and collectively
to anticipate ethical dilemmas and to avoid bringing harm to those with whom they
work.

We need to think about ethics before we start the research, not after or during the research. We need to do this by ourselves (because we know our own research best). We also need to think about these things as a field. We need to do this in order to make sure that people who participate in linguistic research don’t get harmed by it.

Some kinds of linguistic research fall under the purview of formal human subjects
regulations. This document is not meant to replace formal ethics oversight; nor is it
meant to provide an exhaustive code of conduct. Rather, it is meant to provide
linguists working in all subdisciplines with a very general framework for making
ethical choices.

There are laws about how university researchers can do their research. This is very important when the research involves working directly with people (“human subjects”). There are definitions in law about who is a “human subject” (see Tanya’s recent post about this). This ethics document isn’t that type of document, though. We couldn’t cover every possible thing that might happen in linguistic research. Also, this ethics statement isn’t a replacement for your university’s own ethics requirements (that is, even if you follow this ethics guide, your university and country might have other guidelines, requirements, or laws that you also need to think about).

Comments welcome!

Someone recently sent me a link to the Australian Indigenous Law Reporter’s 2003 Guidelines for Indigenous Research. These are not IRB guidelines; they have no legislative power (as far as I know), they apply to research done through the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (note that research project here has no technical definition).

The first paragraph is striking:

It is ethical practice in any research on Indigenous issues to include consultation with people who may be directly affected by the research or research outcomes whether or not the research involves fieldwork.

This would seem to imply that if I go to my local library and use published materials to write a paper on some aspect of Indigenous languages, I would need to obtain the permission of those groups (who? the person who talked to the original researcher and their family? the community council? the Land Council?) in order to publish it.

Section 7 contains the following guideline:

Research on Indigenous issues should also incorporate Indigenous perspectives and this is often most effectively achieved by facilitating more direct involvement in the research.

Does this imply that research which may be contradictory to “Indigenous perspectives” is inethical? For example, is research in Australian prehistory inethical, since a hypothesis of mid-Holocene expansion of Indigenous groups in Australia is in contradiction to traditional belief systems which either place people on the land since the beginning of time or have languages placed there by culture heroes? How does one sensitively and appropriately incorporate perspectives which are based on an incompatible set of assumptions? (At some level this guideline seems to me to be not all that different from requiring research on evolution to incorporate perspectives on creationism.)

Finally, these guidelines appear internally contradictory by simultaneously requiring recognition of individual differences while (in several different sections) demanding public acknowledgement of participants. They demand consensus, negotiation and inclusion of indigenous participants as researchers while at the same time requiring research participants to defer at all times to an undefined group of people. That also seems to be contradictory.

The intent of the guidelines is clear; the guidelines seem to guard against the type of exploitative, generalistic and unethical research which indigenous people (particularly in Australia) are justifiably angry about and eager to prevent. Does a set of guidelines like this achieve that?

I received a question from a researcher this week asking whether or not eliciting grammatical judgments for syntactic research required IRB review. IRB review is only required for projects that are “research” (which this collecting elicitations is) and that include “human subjects’ defined in U.S. federal research regulations. Here is the definition of human subject:

“45CFR46.102 (f) Human subject means a living individual about whom an investigator (whether professional or student) conducting research obtains

(1) Data through intervention or interaction with the individual, or
(2) Identifiable private information.

Intervention includes both physical procedures by which data are gathered (for example, venipuncture) and manipulations of the subject or the subject’s environment that are performed for research purposes. Interaction includes communication or interpersonal contact between investigator and subject. Private information includes information about behavior that occurs in a context in which an individual can reasonably expect that no observation or recording is taking place, and information which has been provided for specific purposes by an individual and which the individual can reasonably expect will not be made public (for example, a medical record). Private information must be individually identifiable (i.e., the identity of the subject is or may readily be ascertained by the investigator or associated with the information) in order for obtaining the information to constitute research involving human subjects.”

Based on this, would you conclude that eliciting grammatical judgments constitutes “human subjects” research? If no, how would you convince your IRB that this type of research does not need review? And then, how about collecting speech samples for phonetic analysis?

Imagine the following situation:

A linguist is doing fieldwork in a small village. Some of the linguist’s consultants would like to be identified and acknowledged by name in publications relating to the work. However, publishing these names in connection with the language name will allow the identification of previous fieldwork participants who strongly wished to remain anonymous.

• What are the ethical issues here?
• How could the linguist proceed?

IRB Spotlight: Benefits

Since understanding the question gets you half way to the answer on your IRB application, today’s post about one of the questions that is on all human subjects applications.  Your IRB application will ask you to explain the direct benefits of your research project for (1) the individual subjects, and (2) society or the research community as a while.  Even if your application doesn’t divide it into two questions, they are still looking for two answers.

(1) What are the anticipated benefits for individual subjects?

The purpose of this question is to find out if individual subjects will receive some benefit from participation in your study, but in order to answer the question, you need to know what the IRB means by benefit.

Benefits to individual subjects are thought of in terms of therapeutic or educational interventions, or results from hearing tests, lab tests, and other cognitive measurements.  IRBs do not generally consider the opportunity ‘to express an opinion,’ ‘reflect on a given topic,’ or ‘talk to a researcher’ to be benefits for individual subjects.  So even though the subjects may enjoy the chance to talk about a given topic, the IRB will likely not consider it a benefit. If the potential risks to your subjects are low, or if you take strong measures to protect confidentiality, then it is perfectly acceptable to say that subjects will not benefit from participation.

Payment to study participants is NOT considered a benefit of research participation. Payment is considered to be compensation for time and inconvenience.

(2) What are the anticipated benefits for society?

This is a section that causes most researchers little trouble, given that they have defended their research proposal, written grant applications, and spent endless hours figuring out just where the research project might fill a gap in our existing knowledge about a given area.

For researchers who are working with small, vulnerable, or easily identifiable communities (e.g., Native American communities, rural—or island bound—communities, etc.) your research may not directly benefit individual subjects, but may have the potential to directly benefit their larger community.  If this is the case for your research, please make this clear because it is something that your IRB should know. But be aware that in these circumstances there are often community level risks that you should address in the application.

Philip Rubin of Haskins Labs has set up a Facebook group for all aspects of working with human subjects in the behavioral, cognitive, and social sciences.