As Chair of the University\u2019s Ethics Committee, I have been reflecting on how we talk about research ethics and how we process ethical approvals at Loughborough – and perhaps most importantly how it is sometimes felt by colleagues and students across the institution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Too often I see ethics is framed as a hurdle by colleagues. A form to get through. A procedural requirement and thus a risk that something might be delayed, challenged, or blocked. In some cases, I worry that this creates what might be described as an \u201cethics phobia\u201d: a sense that ethics exists to trip people up, rather than to help them do better, stronger, more thoughtful research. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its best, research ethics is an enabler of excellent research. It helps us ask better questions. It supports more robust methodologies. It strengthens relationships with participants, communities, partners, funders and the public. It protects researchers as well as participants and it gives confidence that the work we do is not only rigorous, but responsible, respectful and trustworthy. It also helps us navigate the balance between risk and opportunity. Research, by its nature, often involves uncertainty. It pushes into new spaces, asks difficult questions, works with real-world complexity, and sometimes engages with people, organisations or communities in sensitive contexts. The role of ethics is not to eliminate all risk, nor to make research so cautious that important work becomes impossible. Rather, it is to help us understand risk clearly, manage it proportionately, and make thoughtful decisions that enable valuable research to proceed in the right way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is especially important to me and to the sort of research culture I think we want at Loughborough. We are an ambitious research-intensive university with a distinctive commitment to impact, partnership and real-world change. Our research increasingly takes place beyond traditional disciplinary or institutional boundaries: with communities, industry, policymakers, public bodies, schools, health partners, athletes, charities and international collaborators. In those settings, ethics cannot be a bolt-on. It need to be embedded at the start of the journey and in how we build trust, shape methods, and demonstrate the quality of the research we do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To me ethics and ethical research is a research culture issue. The way we do research matters. Research culture is not only about funding success, outputs, collaborations or impact case studies. It is also about the everyday practices, behaviours and judgements that shape how research is imagined, designed, delivered and shared. Ethics sits right at the heart of that culture. It asks us to think about power, care, consent, inclusion, vulnerability, risk, benefit and accountability. It reminds us that the people, communities, organisations and environments we work with are not simply sources of data, but partners, stakeholders and knowledge-holders in their own right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This also connects directly to our EDI agenda and our values. Ethical research and inclusive research are not separate agendas. If we are serious about equity, diversity and inclusion, then we must also be serious about who gets to shape research questions, whose voices are heard, whose experiences are recognised, who bears the burden of participation, and who benefits from the knowledge we produce. Ethics gives us a practical framework for asking those questions with care and rigour. It helps us move beyond seeing EDI as an additional requirement, and instead recognise inclusion as fundamental to research quality, relevance and impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That does not mean every project is high risk. Nor does it mean ethics should become overly bureaucratic or disproportionate. Quite the opposite. A good ethics system should be proportionate, enabling and supportive. It should help low-risk research move efficiently, while giving appropriate attention to work involving greater complexity, sensitivity or uncertainty. But for that to happen well, we need to shift the culture around ethics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We need colleagues and doctoral researchers to feel able to ask questions early, rather than worrying that asking will slow things down. We need DR advisors and research leaders to treat ethics as part of research design and development, not as an afterthought once the \u201creal\u201d work has already been planned. We need committees and reviewers to be constructive, clear and consistent in their advice. And we need the institution to keep listening to researchers about where the system is working well, and where it unintentionally creates friction. There is also an important leadership point here. If researchers experience ethics primarily as bureaucracy, we should not simply tell them they are wrong. We should ask what in our processes, language or behaviours has created that perception. Good governance is not only about having the right structures. It is also about how those structures are experienced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is why I am keen for us to continue improving how ethics operates at Loughborough. Not by weakening standards, but by strengthening understanding. Not by making ethics optional or informal, but by making it clearer, more proportionate and more visibly connected to research quality, researcher confidence and institutional ambition. Ethics should give people confidence to do ambitious work and our policies and processes should help researchers navigate difficult questions rather than avoid them. It should support innovation, not chill it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There will always be moments when ethical review asks us to pause, reconsider or redesign. That is not failure and should not be seen as such. That is the system doing something valuable. Some of the best research is improved because someone asked: have we thought carefully enough about who is affected, who benefits, who carries the risk, and how this work will be understood beyond the research team? So my ask is simple. Let us stop seeing ethics as the final task before research can begin. Let us see it as part of good research design from the outset. At Loughborough, doing research well means doing research responsibly. Ethics is not there to trip us up. It is there to help us take the right risks, pursue the right opportunities, and stand on firmer ground.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As Chair of the University\u2019s Ethics Committee, I have been reflecting on how we talk about research ethics and how we process ethical approvals at Loughborough – and perhaps most importantly how it is sometimes felt by colleagues and students across the institution. Too often I see ethics is framed as a hurdle by colleagues. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":776,"featured_media":1344,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"lboro_blog_alternative_thumbnail_image":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[72,173,51,172],"class_list":["post-1340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ethics","tag-edi","tag-research-culture","tag-research-ethics","tag-responsible-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/rdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/rdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/rdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/rdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/776"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/rdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1340"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/rdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1341,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/rdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions\/1341"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/rdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/rdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/rdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/rdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}