“Regulations don’t solve things. Supervision solves things”
Wilbur Ross 2015

Dr Gary Allen, Prof. Colin Thomson AM and Prof Mark Israel
AHRECS Senior Consultants

HDR supervisors should, and often do, play an important role in the formulation of a candidate’s research ethics review application. If you talk to an experienced busy research ethics committee member, they will tell you they’ve seen too many applications where there wasn’t any indication the supervisor even saw the application prior to its submission.

Many institutions consider the supervisor to be the lead investigator for candidate research. Even those that don’t usually will expect the supervisor to be a key adviser and mentor for the candidate’s passage through the research ethics review process.

A supervisor not taking an active role in a candidate’s review application can reflect a worrying attitude: “I don’t have time to know about research ethics in detail. The candidate should submit what they have, the experts on the committee can tell them what they need to fix and how they want it changed.”

Such thinking is irresponsible and concerning at numerous levels, not least because research ethics is a fundamental component of the quality design of research.

Being able to think and write about ethical challenges is an essential component of the research training of new researchers.

A supervisor or a research school that isn’t systematically engaged in a candidate’s ethical capacity-building and professional development is failing them.

But a not unreasonable question is “What should I be looking for, when I read an HDR candidate’s application?” A reader of the Research Ethics Monthly asked for a tool she could use.

Attached here is the start of such a tool. The Research Ethics Monthly community includes some very experienced research ethics reviewers. It would be deeply appreciated if you could comment on what we have drafted and suggest other elements for the tool.

This post may be cited as:
Allen, G., Thomson, C. & Israel, M. (24 May 2020) A checklist to assist supervisor to check a candidate’s research ethics review application Research Ethics Monthly. Retrieved from: https://ahrecs.com/human-research-ethics/a-checklist-to-assist-supervisor-to-check-a-candidates-research-ethics-review-application