Seminar: Current ethical challenges & needs in Australian e-research

VU's Centre for Cultural Diversity & Wellbeing would like to invite you to a seminar on Current ethical challenges and needs in Australian e-research. 

This seminar will be presented by Associate Professor Craig Fry, Research Program Leader - Culture and Values in Health, and NHMRC Career Development Fellow.

E-research may be defined as the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to enable existing and new forms of:

• research sampling
• recruitment
• data collection
• analyses
• visualisation.

An increasingly diverse range of e-research methods are now evident in research with human participants in Australia, including:

• online participant recruitment
• smart-phone data collection and health intervention trials
• internet-based survey, interview, and other data collection/mining
• digital photo/video methods
• ICT-enabled data linkage.

Use of these methods in Australia is becoming especially common with populations that are difficult to identify, recruit and retain in research, treatment and other interventions (e.g. in adolescent mental health and substance use fields).

In the midst of these innovations, emerging evidence suggests that many researchers and Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) members remain uncertain about how to respond to the ethical challenges arising in the e-research area. A 2011 NHMRC paper concluded:

“The National Statement was published before the ethical issues raised by these developments became apparent so it currently provides no specific guidance for Internet-based or other forms of online research.”

This seminar will report on a recent national study of ethical challenges in Australian e-research. An online survey was conducted in 2013 with Australian researchers currently using e-research methods, and HRECs reviewing e-research applications. 128 online questionnaires were completed by researchers (n=71), and HREC Chairs/representatives (n=57) across each state and territory. The seminar will present findings on researcher and HREC experiences with key ethical challenges that exist in Australian e-research today, and their attitudes about current research ethics policy and guidelines needs in this area.

RSVP

RSVP for this seminar by Tuesday 29 October by emailing [email protected].