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Reporting Ethics Committee Approval in Public Administration Research

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Abstract

While public administration research is thriving because of increased attention to social scientific rigor, lingering problems of methods and ethics remain. This article investigates the reporting of ethics approval within public administration publications. Beginning with an overview of ethics requirements regarding research with human participants, I turn to an examination of human participants protections for public administration research. Next, I present the findings of my analysis of articles published in the top five public administration journals over the period from 2000 to 2012, noting the incidences of ethics approval reporting as well as funding reporting. In explicating the importance of ethics reporting for public administration research, as it relates to replication, reputation, and vulnerable populations, I conclude with recommendations for increasing ethics approval reporting in public administration research.

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Notes

  1. The idea of human participants in research protections was interpreted broadly to account for the multi-national nature of public administration research and publication. It was not expected that all authors would follow US specific legislation and wording (e.g., Common Rule and Institutional Review Board (IRB)). This broad interpretation was chosen to account for the “light-touch” model implemented by the United Kingdom, other European, and Asian nations. (Office for Human Research Protections 2012; Economic and Social Research Council 2010).

  2. To the best of our knowledge, there are no currently published studies comparing the likelihood and magnitude, and thus dimensions of comparability, between physical harms stemming from biomedical research and informational harms stemming from social scientific research. However, current work by Jordan (2013), is developing an evaluation scale and assessment tool for informational risks evaluation that is a corollary to the proposed "Systematic Evaluation of Research Risks" by Rid et al. (2010), which looked at physical risks from common medical research procedures (e.g., percutaneous biopsy).

  3. Clinical scientists are moving towards models to do this, such as the use of the CONSORT statement rules. Public opinion researchers also seem to be moving this direction with the requirements of data reporting standards. .

  4. As reported by these authors, the survey data presented here was gathered under a research project approved by the Institutional Review Board at Texas A and M University (Jordan and Hill 2012a, p. 727).

  5. The author and her assistant developed a standard workflow for data gathering. First, the abstract of the article was reviewed for an initial judgment of the empirical nature of the article. To do this, each abstract was read closely and if the abstract indicated that survey data, interviews, focus groups, participant observations, case-studies, or experiments were conducted, or if implicit indicator phrases, such as “respondents” or “we contacted” were mentioned, the full text of the article was downloaded in pdf format. With the full-text of the article, key word searches were conducted. First, a search for the terms “IRB”, “Institution”, “Review”, “Board”, “Committee”, “Human”, “Ethic”, “Compliance”, “Grant” and “Fund” was run. Second, if this key word query did not produce expected results, then the methods and or data collection sections (to the extent there was such a coherent section, a problem discussed in greater detail below), the acknowledgements section, and sidebars, boxes, footnotes or endnotes were read closely. In the close reading, mentions of analogous terms that were not initially included in the key words for the search, such as unusual names for an institutional ethics committee, were examined. Although time consuming, both the author of this paper and her assistant performed the same queries on the articles in order to ensure that the data was comprehensive and to reduce systematic errors of exclusion.

  6. We did not obtain IRB approval for this study as no identifiable data on individual authors or editors was recorded in the composition of this database or reported in our analysis of this de-identified data set. As this material exists in the public domain with the data owners' voluntary consent, it does not violate the personal data protection laws of the territories from which the authors hail. Further, all of these editors' have self-identified in these public for a (academic journals) as the responsible authors of these articles.

  7. As mentioned above, we also gathered evidence on the number of individuals from whom the authors gathered data, as published in the pieces in these five public administration journals. We gathered numbers of participants in the articles from the articles of these five journals for the issues contained in the volumes identified as 2000 and 2010. A total of 176 articles (2000 n = 60, 2010 n = 116) were analyzed. In this sample, seven articles were not included as there was no indication of participant numbers that could be found or extrapolated based upon the information in the article (3.97 %). We counted as a participant in research the number of respondents whose data the authors report they used. For example, if an author reported contacting 1,000 managers, and received 249 responses, we counted 249 individuals as participants, not 1,000.

  8. Yang and Kassekert use Federal Human Capital Survey 2006 data. On the Office of Personnel Management webpage describing this survey (http://www.fedview.opm.gov/2006/What/) we found no mention of the FHCS being conducted confidentially. The OPM is not listed as a federal agency that complies with the Common Rule. We include these figures here as we cannot be certain what the protections were, or whether the exemption for public benefits or program research and demonstration projects (Exemption 5) of the Common Rule was invoked here (46.101(a)(5)).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Politics and Public Administration, The University of Hong Kong, Jockey Club Social Sciences Building C-950, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, HKSAR

    Sara R. Jordan

  2. Liberal Arts Program, Texas A and M University at Qatar, 328F Texas A and M Engineering Building, Education City, PO Box 23874, Doha, Qatar

    Phillip W. Gray

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Correspondence to Sara R. Jordan.

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Jordan, S.R., Gray, P.W. Reporting Ethics Committee Approval in Public Administration Research. Sci Eng Ethics 20, 77–97 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-013-9436-5

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