Abstract
The difficulty faced by research ethics committees in evaluating ethical conduct in journalism can be considered a recent conundrum. Journalistic investigation has traditionally been seen as residing outside the need for ethics clearances owing to debates around its status as research and to the reluctance of journalism practitioners to subject their investigations to committee evaluation. The inclusion of creative industries in revamped definitions of research, however, means that if journalistic inquiry is to be tallied under national research reward schemes, it must be ethically accountable. This article interrogates the difficulties caused by a conflict of cultures between ethics committees and journalism research and poses a number of possible resolutions. It aims to function as an exploration of key thinking in the field, thus acting as a frame for further development of case-specific examples of the issues raised.
Introduction: Journalism as research
Research ethics has its origins in medical research, and as such research ethics committees, policies and reviewers often have difficulty applying research ethics principles to journalistic research. Similarly, journalist researchers schooled to protect the ideals of the fourth estate may be resistant to ethics committee safeguards designed to protect the well-being of both researcher and subject. The result is a clash of cultures that is ripe for unpacking.
In order to illustrate this tension, it is useful to consider an example. An inquiry by a journalism academic into the difficulties faced by parolees in meeting parole conditions led to informal interviews at short notice with former prisoners with outstanding warrants in which incriminating illegal activity, family relationships and intense emotional hardship were discussed. Trust, confidentiality, and the need for an unplanned interaction between interviewer and subject were required for both the parties’ safety. The traditional and valuable ethics committee safeguards of pre-evaluated questions, identification and de-identification of sources, consent forms and similar protections for members of vulnerable groups could not be carried out as the interview subject viewed these as a risk of exposure and arrest. The journalist researcher himself was reluctant to engage with ethics safeguards in the belief that this would reduce the effectiveness of the interview outcome and make the interview subject reluctant to have further contact for that and other projects. Whilst in the short term the project may have seemed more successful owing to the navigation around ethics committee requirements, the longer term brought a number of problems that an ethics clearance would have resolved. The data gathered, for example, could not be used directly for funded university research and the parolee could not produce evidence to the law courts to prove his claim that he was contributing to the knowledge base of society by participating in a university study. The journalist researcher did not have training in counselling or psychiatric risk assessment, yet had to make quick decisions about the state of mind of the subject at multiple points in the interview. This ended well in this instance, but it could just as easily have not.
It is understandable how this tension between research ethics and journalistic research developed. Journalism was traditionally seen as residing outside the need for ethics clearances because it did not clearly sit within the guidelines of what constituted research (Davies, 2011). This situation hinged on two perceptions: that journalism was the outcome of non-methodologized inquiry (Lamble, 2004) and that it did not engage in the type of ‘social scientific knowledge production’ required by the academy (Boellstorff et al., 2012). Further marginalizing journalism, as Ian Richards explains, was that the definition of research was often interpreted to preclude material published or broadcast in mainstream media (Richards, 2010: 41) or generated for that purpose. This is not surprising, given the perception that investigations published in mainstream media constitute professional practice (Davies, 2011), and may be driven by economic and managerial imperatives regarding newsworthiness and short turnaround times rather than a desire for objective knowledge (Boellstorff et al., 2012: 21−22). Thus journalism, even if it was long-form inquiry into its own practice, history or complex investigation, was considered to be inconsistent in how it went about its work, and also of little knowledge value to the academy.
However, changes to the definitions of research across both Australian and international institutions mean there are now clearer frameworks for evaluating journalistic investigation as research. Australia’s revamped Code of 2007, for example, signalled a broader and more generic approach to the definition of research by casting research as ‘original investigation undertaken to gain knowledge, understanding and insight’ (NHMRC, 2007: 1). Similarly, the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council outlines that research should be constituted by documentation of the process leading to critical reflection (AHHRC, 2009). This documentation can include establishing research questions, positioning these in order to demonstrate how they contribute to a new knowledge, and establishing which methodology will be used (Lindgren and Philips, 2011).
The result of this is that research that traditionally fell outside the boundaries of previous definitions, such as journalism, could now be included if it demonstrated reflexivity and critique of process. Whilst many practitioners situated in the academy, such as Dash (2007) and Lamble (2004), argue that journalistic inquiry, particularly long-form works, has its own particular methodologies because ‘journalism is, journalism happens’ (Lamble, 2004), there is a tendency to talk about these methods in the language of other accepted qualitative research approaches, such as ethnography and sociology. This connection is understandable, as social sciences methods, particularly those of an ethnographic nature, such as fieldwork interviews, observation as a form of data collecting, fieldwork note-taking and journaling, and the use of theoretical investigation could be seen to have clear similarities to journalistic methods (Boellstorff et al., 2012: 21; Makagon and Neumann, 2009; Waller, 2010), most obviously interviewing of subjects and sources, observation of relationships and situations (Boellstorff et al., 2012: 21), note-taking, and investigation into the development and functioning of frameworks such as political processes and structures of social institutions. Framing these through social sciences methods is a useful approach, as techniques may often sit tacitly in journalistic practice, resulting in a lack of recognition that articulation of process, reflection and documentation (Lamble, 2004) do occur, and hence ending in a failure to regard outcomes as products of rigorous research. This problem of recognition is not dissimilar to the challenges faced by early ethnographic investigation used in the fields of anthropology and sociology, when participant observation related information-gathering and investigation was seen to reside outside the scientific paradigm of verifiable data and replicable results (Boellstorff et al., 2012: 15). Ethnographers overcome this perception by more specific theorization of methods such as fieldwork (through the work of Bronislaw Malinowski, for instance (Kuper, 1996)), and one could argue that it is at this threshold that journalistic research now stands. The need to describe, explain and justify their methods will only grow in pertinence as academic interest in journalism’s use as a method of inquiry into both its own history and the world around it expands (Loffelholz and Weaver, 2008).
In an age of increased pressure on university staff to publish, acceptance of journalistic inquiry as research is welcomed as it means that outputs of a journalistic nature can gain publication points under the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) guidelines (Davies, 2011). A further advantage is that with this recognition comes the potential for more opportunities for funding (Dale, 2011), including through the NHMRC and the Australian Research Council (Davies, 2011). However, this then means that these non-traditional research outputs and their processes are ethics-testable. This places practitioners of journalistic research and ethics committees under an additional degree of scrutiny as the methods outlined in the previous section are evaluated for their impact on the subjects of study. For social scientists, this scrutiny and the anticipated and resulting recommendations are mapped into the proposed project. The less predictable nature of journalistic inquiry, however, can make this type of mapping extremely difficult. It is this difficulty that this article explores. Whilst its discussion leans towards Australian contexts, there is reference to international protocols and issues.
Brief literature review
Research into the place of ethics in academic writing has tended toward a strong view for or against the role of institutional ethics committees (also known as institutional review boards) in the academic process, with either a creative arts academic lamenting how the ethics process restricts their academic and artistic freedom, or an ethics academic decrying the lack of understanding over the importance and impact of ethical review. For example, Dash (2007) staunchly opposes ethics committees overseeing any of the work of journalism professors or students. At the 12th Conference of the Australian Association of Writing Programs, Evans (2007) also decried the impact of ethics committees on academic writers. Hunter (2011) considers the formal legally required ethical review system in the United Kingdom and how it only focuses on medical related research. While there are more considered approaches, these are few and far between. These include Arnold (2009), who recognizes that shifts in the boundaries between objective and subjective research in genres such as creative (or narrative) non-fiction require ethics committees to reconsider their use of particular personnel, and Richards (2010), who suggests that research committees need to understand the context, background and cultural development of the journalistic process as a way of encouraging academics from the discipline of journalism to participate in HREC discussions. There is still debate about whether journalistic writing should be considered research, with Davies, as recently as 2011, still feeling the need to reiterate Lamble’s far-reaching argument that journalism is a sound research methodology and has indeed been functioning as such since the days of ancient Greece (Lamble, 2004). Lamble himself offers an excellent outline of how discussion around the notion of journalistic methodology has developed over the past 20 years, ranging from Parsigian (1986) to Medsger (2002). Beyond this, however, there is a paucity of research on the ethical review of creative industry projects from the perspective of the ethics committee.
Ethics committees
The National Health and Medical Research Council (2012) describe how human research ethics policies originated in medical research. The Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (National Health and Medical Research Council, 2007) defines research as:
… original investigation undertaken to gain knowledge, understanding and insight. It is a broad concept and there is no simple, single way to define research for all disciplines.
With this in mind, ethics committees have responsibility over all ‘research’ that ‘involves human participants’. However, whilst the NHMRC has recognized there is no single way to define research for all disciplines, ethics committees often try to apply a single set of rules and policies across these varied disciplines. Committees are typically made up of academics and laymen but often have a bias towards members whose understanding of research falls within the traditional quantitative/qualitative paradigm (Hunter, 2007). This is often compounded by national and institutional policies that are based around those traditional quantitative/qualitative methodologies.
Ethics committee evaluation of journalistic research
Journalism research conducted within academia, whether by research staff or students, is particularly challenging for ethics committees because the main method of journalistic inquiry is the interview (Richards, 2010; Schudson, 1995, cited in Richards, 2010). At first glance this should not be a problem, as ethics committees are well versed in dealing with applications that involve requests to interview subjects for qualitative projects. Under nationally sanctioned ethics policies, interactions with human subjects for research purposes require ethical evaluation and, as an interview is an interaction with a human subject, it clearly falls under the committee’s umbrella of responsibility. As a part of this well accepted procedure, the applicant may be required to identify who they are likely to be talking to and if they fall under any particular categories of vulnerability.
However, a difficulty arises when students of journalism and former journalists now working as academics are, or have been, trained in the principles of journalistic practice via the practitioner system, whether workplace through industry culture or cadetship training. This often means that they are used to conducting interviews without prior approval or scrutiny (Richards, 2010). Their work as journalists conditions them to view interviews as a workplace-related interaction, a method of fact checking, or an impromptu device for finding and testing out the veracity and durability of a story. There is often a natural resistance on their part to the notion of having to submit questions beforehand to strangers (Davies, 2011), to have to adhere to these questions, and to amend questions in order to protect the vulnerable and those at risk. While contemporary revisions to most nation’s guidelines for research on human participants (for example, 2007 revisions to the Australian NHMRC model) allow for greater flexibility in the nature, definition and expected outcomes of interviews (Davies, 2011; Richards, 2010), there is often still a strong perception that the submission of any specific information related to the nature and approach of questions posed during interviews flies in the face of the functions of the fourth estate by which journalism defends and defines itself (Dash, 2007; Davies, 2011). This results in much journalistic research conducted in academia being withheld, whether through innocent ignorance or deliberate avoidance, from the ethics committee process.
Additionally, exactly what constitutes an interview is frequently hard to determine when a journalist is working in the field or conducting research. Schudson (1995, cited in Richards, 2010: 35) defines an interview in the broad and malleable terms that are common to all definitions of the interviewing process, and suggests that it is an often fluid social interaction between an individual of public interest and a professional writer, and that it can also be considered the literary output that is the product of that interaction. Journalists argue that their job and knowledge discovery requires networking and interactions with human sources that may be impromptu: in the pub, on the bus, in the laneway behind a workplace (Richards, 2010). With this in mind, they may not present projects that involve these interactions for ethical review on the grounds that, in their minds, they do not resemble the type of formal interviews that fall under the gamut of the ethics committee. If they do submit these for ethics evaluation, the malleable nature of the interviews may prove challenging for the committees to understand and offer recommendations upon. Indeed, both Davies (2011) and Richards (2010) suggest that these types of research encounters that do not have a clear start and finish pose difficulties for ethics committees. As Davies explains, these difficulties may extend to having to dedicate time to review many possible story ideas that have not been road-tested to see ‘if they have legs’ (Davies, 2011: 169) and that may not eventuate beyond the planning or initial interview stage as the researcher’s presumption that initiated the investigation is proven incorrect or unfounded (Dash, 2007). A further problem may arise if committees cannot understand and satisfactorily deal with what Langlois calls ‘accidental’ research. Accidental research, Langlois explains, is information that arises out of activities such as a phone call to a representative of public office, a passing conversation, or a random chat ‘over cocktails with a judge’ (Langlois, cited in Lane, 2007).
It is also problematic for both the journalist in academia and the student of journalism when the ethics application requires questions to be determined weeks before the interview is to be held. As Richards explains, ‘journalism practitioners are used to acting quickly and flexibly, pursuing issues as they emerge during an interview, and this is difficult if one is required to adhere to a pre-determined script’ (Richards, 2010: 38). If the practitioner and the student are writing about hot topics or current issues, the information available to them through the 24-hour news cycle will inevitably change, increase and evolve over the course of a day, a few days or a week. The duration between submission of the ethics evaluation request and its return also compounds this difficulty.
A further issue to consider that seems to have garnered little attention in existing literature about the relationship between ethics committees and journalistic research is that many interviews and interactions need to be unplanned for safety purposes. As illustrated in the example given in the opening paragraph of this discussion, this may be because interview subjects are whistle-blowers, criminals, and people who have information that challenges the agendas of those in power. Just because a journalist is working in academia does not mean their investigations are any less difficult or have to be steered away from the harder streetwise issues that affect society (Richards, 2010). Writing about criminal culture or the underworld often entails impromptu meetings outside the nine-to-five ordinary working day and is notoriously hard to formalize in a consistent plan. The interview itself often moves through unpredictable territory: what the journalist wants to ask may not be what they get to ask. It becomes crucial to engage in a high degree of thinking on one’s feet and working around what a source wants to communicate. There is also a high degree of trust-building that must be undertaken when working with these types of sources. If the source senses that there are other parties involved or a lot of documentation about them, their role, their identity or their knowledge, they will, to put it colloquially, be ‘off like a shot’.
The issues raised in this article so far in relation to the complexities of marrying the world of journalistic research and ethical vigilance centre on the problem of the interview. There are, however, broader clashes of culture between journalistic research, the fourth estate function of journalism and ethics committees that also have an impact on the willingness of researchers to submit their work and the ability of the committees to advise effectively on that work.
The central concern of the ethics committee is to ensure that researchers do no harm to their participants and that the vulnerable are protected. There are many ways that journalism, journalistic research and students completing assessments can cause harm. These include research, topics or questions that could be considered an ‘invasion of privacy’ and publication of results that could cause ‘reputational harm’ (Richards, 2010). Yet the primary task of the journalist, according to the Australian Journalists Association, is to demonstrate ‘respect for truth and the public’s right for information’ (MEAA, 2012) and to uphold the traditional notion of the fourth estate, in which the press investigate without fear or favour. Indeed, there are many instances where the public would expect the privacy of a wrong-doing person or someone who abuses their power to be ‘invaded’ for the greater good, or for the requirement of informed consent to be waivered. Nelson offers the examples of interacting with the Klu Klux Klan or a member of the Nazi Party, during which they ‘might merit humanity qualified with disapproval and … might, on occasion, appropriately be challenged aggressively in an interview’ (Nelson, 2004: 210, cited in Richards, 2010). While these are extreme and reductionist examples, telling the truth, as Black et al. (1997) note, can result in a forthright incompatibility with the spirit of ethics clearance. This might range from covertly observing the frequency of hand-washing by medical staff (NHMRC, 2007), and subcultural drug use patterns, to the challenges of meeting parole conditions. Researchers who, for example, aim to investigate unlawful activity may not be able to gain informed consent without jeopardizing the research. While most national ethics statements attempt to mediate this tension between greater good, the fourth estate function, and respect for the individual by allowing for exemptions for research likely to expose illegal activity or abuses of power, many university ethics committees may deny these exemptions on the grounds of legal risk or through conservatism (Davies, 2011). Alternatively, researchers may not be aware, or be made aware, that these clauses (such as Australia’s National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research 2007 amendments, clauses 2.3.3, 2.3.4, 2.3.7 and 4.6) offer a specific and proceduralized waiver for disclosure, limited disclosure and informed consent (Davies, 2011). Some research project ideas may be abandoned before submission to ethics committees on the assumption that investigations of this nature stand limited chance of approval. Indeed, a 2010 survey found that, across Australia’s four largest states, no journalism research had appealed to these clauses (Davies, 2010).
Ethics committees wish to protect vulnerable groups. So, too, journalists often see themselves as protecting the vulnerable, in their case, from abuses of power. The vulnerable, then, are a frequent subject and source of reporting, and so these groups will often make up a large proportion of the journalist’s investigations and interviews. However, the reality is that reporting on the vulnerable can indeed cause harm (Plaisance, 2009; Richards, 2010): through the trauma of revisiting an event, from the victimisation that can result from publicity and becoming an unintentional public figure, from retribution, and from the vulnerable not being sure how to deal with this attention. The consideration and recommendations of ethics committees are particularly valuable here as ethics committees, both as a collection of members and as a group, may have had considerable experience at examining and tracking the after-effects of research on these sectors of society. This value adds to the importance of creating dialogue between creative practitioners and ethics committees.
These issues are made even more complex by the rise in form and popularly of creative non-fiction. Also known as literary journalism and narrative non-fiction, the genre eschews journalism’s traditional claims to objectivity and instead embraces the subjective, whether through the inclusion of the writer as a source or character in the retelling of an event or the injection of the author’s own opinion and observations. The most well-known examples of the form are Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1999) and Australian author Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004). The difficulties of writing in the genre are well noted. Suzanne Eggins (2005), discussing the challenges faced by Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004), outlines how difficult it is ‘to blend the objectivity, balance, “facticity”, and source-based reportage of journalistic genres with the subjective, self-reflexive, imaginatively sourced narrative drive of literary forms’ (Eggins, 2005: 124, cited in Arnold, 2009). Submitting the work for ethical clearance requires consideration not only of the issues already discussed above in relation to journalistic inquiry, but further considerations into the ethical evaluations required by writings about and involving the self, or author as character. A case of this nature involved a journalist researcher working on exposing the exploitation of caravan park residents by park owners in states that did not enact a robust Residential Tenancies Act. The researcher had once lived in the caravan park and chose to present the data as a set of short stories based on her experiences as a participant observer in the park. The issues considered by the ethics committee centred on de-identifying the human objects of study, including herself, through composites and amalgamations of tenant’s personalities, reactions and situations. It took a number of months for the researcher and the committee to settle on this method as the researcher had trouble articulating the usually tacit and instinctual process of creating fictional characters, and the ethics committee had considerable trouble conceptualizing how composite characters would not identify the real people they were vaguely based on. These considerations are complicated and complex and are best suited to investigation in a separate article.
This brings us to the question of what can be done to minimize, or at least manage, the conflicts of culture discussed in this article.
Possible resolutions
The first step to overcoming this conflict of culture could be to encourage academics experienced in journalistic research to participate as ethics committee members. This is not necessarily an easy feat for, as Richards suggests, to date there seems to be a reluctance from such staff to take this step (Richards, 2010: 43). Alternatively, and as experienced by one of the authors of this article, if a researcher from a non-traditional research area such as journalism does raise their hand to make a commitment to the ethics committee, their research and role might be seen as too marginal to be of assistance. These are unfortunate situations as, if representatives from this school of research could be engaged on the committee, the trickle-down effect could be extremely beneficial not just for the matters that appear before the committee, but also for other academics considering and preparing research projects that touch on journalistic inquiry. Committee members will usually apply the knowledge, understandings and possible resolutions gleaned from debate within the meetings to current and future projects within their local research clusters. Through this dissemination, the relationship between journalistic research and institutional research culture would hopefully be strengthened and demystified. In short, a pathway for dialogue would be created.
This process of dissemination could also lead to a new stratum of ethics committee personnel who may not sit regularly on the committee but who act to give informed recommendation about a project. This could dramatically reduce the time required by the ethics committee to examine an application as it would allow a representative to present information to the committee rather than requiring the committee to read a full application and discuss it (Arnold, 2009: 74).
Consideration could also be given to using existing aspects of ethics evaluation criteria in more creative ways. This could include measuring pre-application community support for a research project as an assessment of ethical validity and as a method of mid-project and post-project reporting. For example, in a case study of her attempt to conduct ethically approved journalistic research in indigenous communities, Waller (2012) suggests a model of journalistic research into marginalized groups that emphasizes reciprocity. In exchange for ongoing consent to participate in a study on bilingual education policy in indigenous communities, sources/informants asked the researcher to produce traditionally journalistic pieces of writing that explained their cultural history and dilemmas to mainstream audiences. Community acceptance of the project thus ‘rested on me agreeing to wear my journalistic hat as well as my academic hat’ (Waller, 2012: 1). This is an expansion of the notion of ‘do no harm’ into the territory of reciprocity (Boellstorff et al., 2012: 130) and encourages both the researcher and the ethics committee to reconsider how the common clause of benefits to participants might be made more concrete. Waller’s ethics approval hinged on this reciprocity and was validated by the gathering of feedback and comment about the journalistic articles from the participant community. Of course, this approach may be problematic as it could position the researcher in the role of activist as well as researcher, but it is an interesting model as it utilizes journalistic inquiry as a product as well as a research methodology.
In relation to the tension between the ideals of the fourth estate and the notion of informed consent, this has already been tackled to some extent in the 2007 revisions to the NHMRC Act. An attempt to preserve both the concept of the fourth estate and the need to gain informed consent has resulted in new recommendations in how ethics committees should interpret the concept of informed consent. These include removing the need for formal letters double-signed by interview subjects, and the waiving of informed consent completely if the research can be proven to expose unlawful acts or corrupt behaviour and if a ‘greater social good results from the exposure’ (Davies, 2011: 161). These amendments allow journalistic research to investigate areas in a safer and more reliable manner than previously, when all participants were required to be notified and to give permission for inclusion.
Yet there may still be concern amongst applicants as to whether ethics committee members are confident in when and how to apply these altered clauses. A situation of more open dialogue between committees and journalistic researchers would again go some way to addressing this, with value and relationship building gained from regular information sessions, drop-ins and shared experience seminars.
It is hoped that these proposed solutions provide further fodder for discussion around this complex and increasingly common problem. Regardless of which ways forward are embraced, a bridging of the two cultures is essential, not just for the effective functioning of ethics committees and the journalism researcher, but also for the wider practice of research.