Ethics of CER

General Introduction to Ethical Principles

Historically, research has been a vehicle for the exploitation of or harm toward marginalized communities, wherein traditional research paradigms firmly place institutions and university researchers as experts and discoverers of knowledge, often at the expense of communities who are involved as “subjects.” In contrast to such extractive modes of research, CER situates communities and community organizations in a central role in every stage of the research process. Ethical principles are central to a model that is being created for a better balance between University researchers and communities.

Despite basic ethical guidelines mandated at the University, CER researchers understand that conceptions of right and wrong are anything but universal, especially in research that spans diverse cultural, geographic, socioeconomic, religious, or other contexts. CER ethical principles are based on and inspired by several early texts.

(1) The Belmont Report was produced by The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioural Research, and lists three core ethical principles:

• Respect for persons,
• Respect for benificence, and
• Respect for justice
  

(2) First Nations Principles of OCAP, as laid out by the First Nations Information Governance Centre (FNIGC[1]), are: 

• Ownership,
• Control,
• Access, and
• Possession.

An additional resource that informs our principles is the “Toolbox of Research Principles in an Aboriginal Context[2]” (2018) which lays out the following priorities: respect, fairness, reciprocity, collaboration, and culture.

Menzies pointed out that “to deny the colonial legacy by not adapting our research projects to accommodate Aboriginal concerns is to participate in the colonial project itself”[3]. Thus, the ten ethical principles we have identified are derived from several sources that are community-driven, Indigenous-led, institutional, and/or academic. We consider these principles to be of paramount importance to the fair and equitable engagement between researchers and communities. This is neither an exhaustive list, nor is it universally agreed-upon, however, it does take up the work and key ideas of more than forty CER resources that were examined for a literature review.

If you are a community engaged researcher or community partner/collaborator, we encourage you to ask questions of your CER project, and to ensure that the design has built in adequate time and space for ethical considerations. 

A modern adaptation and expansion of these principles can be found in the American Psychological Association Ethics Code (2017) five general principles, which are:

• Benificence and nonmalificence,
• Fidelity and responsibility,
• Integrity,
• Justice, and
• Respect for people’s rights and dignity. 

Although higher education institutions also have stringent ethical guidelines and ethics review boards (e.g. SFU Research Ethics Board, 2020) that take these principles into account, institutional and association guidelines are rarely generated collaboratively with communities, hence the emergence of CER and other community-oriented paradigms. One local example of a collaboratively developed and context-specific ethics document can be found in “Research 101: A Manifesto for Ethical Research in the Downtown Eastside” (Boilevin et al, 2019).  Of particular influence to our thinking and actions at CERi is the robust body of scholarship in Indigenous methodologies and the leadership of local and national First Nations communities who guide our work.