Ethics play an important role in how people interact with the world. They help people make decisions around right and wrong and avoid risks.
However, ethical considerations become more important when dealing with sensitive topics or when interacting with the public; the risks increase, so it's crucial to make those decisions carefully.
What is a user research ethics committee?
Last year, we launched an internal user research ethics committee, which is owned and run by our user research team.
This has been a new way of working for us, so we wanted to talk openly about how it’s gone so far.
The origins of research ethics are rooted in the historical experiments of 20th-century medical research, notably the Nuremberg trials. The declarations made following these experiments were responsible for the underlying principles of ethical research we follow today: respect participants, avoid harm, and balance the risk and benefit of any research.
Ethics committees are more commonly used in the academic world, where a formal proposal is taken to a board of academic professionals for approval or rejection. These can take months to process and are rigorous due to the serious and potentially fatal nature of what they cover. Ethical processes like these are important to protect participants from harm when taking part in research, no matter what the research type.
There is a difference between health or academic research and user research. Health and academic research often focus on the direct impact upon their participants, through medical interventions, or psychological examination. The result is something that will be applied to an individual. Whereas user research focuses on how users interact with services and products, to understand that relationship and ways to improve. Following user research, the results are applied to the often digital elements involved.
User research can present risks to the researcher and the participant. Many public services are linked to sensitive topics and research could therefore move into sensitive areas. Due to this, to best protect our users and staff we have formed an adapted version of an ethics community, to work within Agile and user-centred ways of working.
Why we needed an ethics committee
We have conducted user research at CDPS since its inception in 2020 and our maturity has developed significantly since then. We are now a permanent team of user researchers with a research operations function and lots of experience under our belt. Our research is often sensitive in nature, with seldom heard groups, or deals with complex topics, which naturally introduces risk. At its core, user research involves interacting with people to deeply understand their experiences, which introduces:
- risks for CDPS
- risks for participants
- risks for user researchers (and team members)
To continue delivering and scaling our research abilities, and to comply with GDPR and the MRS Code of Conduct, it was important to develop a formal process to assure the quality and ethics of our research.
Our ethics committee is set up to:
- protect participants from harm
- keep user researchers safe
- manage risks around data protection legislation (GDPR)
- assure the quality of user research done across CDPS
- provide user researchers and their teams with confidence
How the process works
All research projects at CDPS are mandated to go through our process. The whole user research team make-up the ethics committee, and we meet as needed to peer review research proposals.
We ask researchers to submit an ethics submission form using Microsoft Forms. We then aim to work with the researcher to give them some early feedback and recommendations.
Once we have reviewed the research submission, we provide one of the below recommendations with written guidance on what else is needed:
- Approve (continue proposed user research activities)
- Approve with amends needed (continue with user research and update submission)
- Pending (pause activity, update and resubmit research proposal)
- Reject (revise your approach and seek further advice)
The key component that we assess is the risk. If a project is likely to be very low-risk then we will take a lighter-touch approach to submissions. If there is a high risk, then it will require more rigorous approvals. It has been important to work closely with delivery managers to ensure we do not block or slow work down and to communicate that our aim is to enable better quality work.
We’ve also worked in the open, creating ethics committee channels internally for the rest of the organisation to reach out and check their work for ethical considerations or seek guidance on their processes, which has allowed us to support the wider business in new and exciting ways.
Benefits for leaders
Although the ethics committee primarily exists to assure the quality of our research and to minimise risk, we have also seen lots of benefits on an organisational level too.
Benefits include:
- Better management of the research we do – and more visibility of what research is happening and when.
- Closer working relationship management with contractors and suppliers.
- Minimises risk of reputational damage.
- Creates a culture of the importance of ethics.
- Shared understanding of what ‘risk’ means in areas outside of DDaT.
- An approach that minimises risk for internal research too.
- Increased confidence for our leadership team in the safety of our research.
- Professional development opportunity for user researchers.
- Increased safety for our research team as there is more visibility of research taking place, and potential psychological toll this could take.
Our reflections so far
This has been a complex but rewarding process to embed within our organisation. It has taken time to rollout, with each submission requiring focused review time from a member of our team to keep things moving.
Alongside this time, we found it incredibly beneficial to spend time training with our team on not just the process but helping them delve into ethics as a topic to refresh on best practice.
It’s also helped us reflect on the work we do, and how we approach projects. Helping us refine how we contextualise our projects, and how to understand risk in various forms.
Not every element worked first time, but in keeping with the spirit of user-centred design we’ve iterated our process, rewriting questions, streamlining forms, and adopting new processes to make sure the process supports our team.
These committee meetings have also helped our team to create more time to review each other’s work, enabling our research team to peer review and enhance the quality of their outputs.
Finally, one of the main benefits has been the increase in ethical thinking across our organisation. Since we launched the committee and opened channels to the rest of the business we’ve been involved in more conversations about the ethical impact of different areas of the business, both internal and external. This has not just enabled our research team to support our wider team more but has enabled CDPS to act more ethically across the board.
There are more steps we can take to iterate on this process, and by its very nature, the committee will review how its doing going forward, but so far it has been a great success for all involved.
