Ethics of Research Involving Human Participants

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Getting things right is critical when working with human participants. Non-ethical research may put the participants at risk or damage the validity of your findings. Moreover, appropriate ethical reflection is a feature of high quality research and goes beyond an approval letter from a research ethics committee. Taking an ethics-by-numbers approach to ethical approval, without due reflection of the specifics concerns involved may lead you to unnecessarily restrict your research. It may also mean you’re less prepared to handle ongoing or unexpected ethical considerations e.g. decision-making in fieldwork or how best to interpret and disseminate data.

On this course, you will learn the principles underpinning ethical research and how to manage issues like seeking informed consent, recruiting vulnerable people, balancing participants’ interests with academic freedom and societal obligations, respecting participant autonomy and reacting to unexpected events. Using case studies and group discussion, this course will explore best practice for working with human participants for you to share your experiences and learn from others.

Following this course, you may also wish to attend the second course in this series, Ethics of Research involving Personal Data, which will be held on 9th December at 10am (register here: https://www.training.cam.ac.uk/opda/event/3687908).

The instructor is Dr Rhys Morgan, Research Governance and Integrity Officer, or Dr Sinead Healy, Research Governance Facilitator, of the Research Strategy Office (RSO).

This course is developed for postdoctoral researchers. It is applicable to postdocs across all disciplines who intend to work with human participants and personal data.

Number of sessions: 1

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

Online participative workshop with presentations, case studies and interactive discussions.

One-hour session