In the 1990s, I worked with many community groups and Native American/African-American communities on the difficult challenges of understanding environmental health risks from low-level radiation contamination. These place-based communities and cultural groups were downwind from nuclear weapons production facilities which had massive deliberate and accidental releases of radiation since their operations began during and after World War II. In the health organizing work I had conducted, I was not aware of the potential of research ethics guidelines to bring more beneficence and protection to these populations and their geographic communities. Soon after formal ethical investigations produced findings of cultural ignorance and a lack of knowledge of research ethics by many researchers involved with human radiation experiments, I decided to pursue doctoral studies to promote ethical protections for place-based communities. After receiving my PhD and doing some extensive studies of bioethical principles and their potential to be applied to groups/communities and place, I have been able to publish new studies/practices in this area. With much support both from National Institute for Health and the National Science Foundation and their grant programs on research ethics training, I have worked with several collaborators to promote research ethics training for graduate students in environmental health/sciences, natural resource sciences and engineering (Quigley et al 2015, see NEEP website http://www.brown.edu/research/research-ethics/neep).

In this blog, I provide a discussion of human subjects protections being extended to the protection of the spatial setting, the place-based identities and meanings of individual and group human subjects in their local communities. In a recent paper (Quigley 2016), I argued for this protection both from recommendations that already exist in bioethical guidelines (National Bioethics Advisory Committee (NBAC) and Council for the International Organization of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) and from field studies that demonstrate important lessons for protection of place and place-based identities. The bioethical principles of beneficence, nonmaleficence, respect for persons/respect for communities and justice are reviewed in this article with detailed guidance about each principle as it relates to protecting place and place-based identities.

• Regulatory guidance exists in terms of the need for researchers to provide benefits to researched populations, to reduce exploitation particularly to racial/cultural and resource-poor groups who are vulnerable subjects, and to allow community consultation on the risks and benefits of research designs. Many resource-poor and politically powerless communities are directly dependent on the subsistence resources of their local spatial settings. Research interventions should not harm these conditions but instead produce beneficial change. Reasonably available benefits should be determined with local representatives (health care providers, community representatives, advocacy groups, scientists and government officials). Such consultation will help to reduce harms, particularly relevant to indigenous groups when the social risks of research can cause disrespect of cultural beliefs, traditions, world views, the violation of local protocols, social stigmatization, and discriminatory harms. For example, in studies of landscape planning, academic researchers co-collaborated with Native community leaders to adopt community-based designs on walking/bike paths, community gardens, mixed use and conservation with housing needs (Thering 2011). Dangles et al (2010) worked with community consultation to ensure that environmental monitoring for control of pests in Andean potato farming and for climate and soil conditions was conducted with community members and particularly with the youth who received training on monitoring technologies which helped to improve youth training opportunities and reduce youth migration. With community collaboration, local community-based benefits can be identified and integrated into technical research plans to improve beneficence.

, I have described how research interventions with cultural groups do require a deep study and practice of an “environmental” cultural competence by researchers, particularly for place-based identities, meanings and past conditions (Quigley 2016b).

There are abundant field studies on new participatory approaches to field research with local communities (see Bibliographies on NEEP website), many of which incorporate collaborative learning about place-based meanings which then lead to research designs which produce local benefits along with technical research activities (capacity-building, skills development, youth outreach, access to critical services, local knowledge guidance about local conditions/resources) These community-based and culturally-competent interventions help to promote the “justice” principle, achieving fair representation, recruitment and fair benefits/burdens for these place-based settings. IRBs are learning more about social risks and community-based protections to ensure more fair treatment, fair benefits and to reduce unintended harms to researched communities.

References

Quigley, D. D. Sonnenfeld, P. Brown, L. Silka, Q. Tian. L. He. Research Ethics Training on Place-based Communities and Cultural Groups. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, DOI 10.1007/s13412-015-0236-x , published online, March 29, 2015.

Quigley, D. (2016a) Applying Place to Research Ethics and Cultural Competence/Humility Training. Journal of Academic Ethics, published online 13 January, Springer

Quigley, D. (2016b) “Building Cultural Competence in Environmental Studies and Natural Resource Sciences”. Society and Natural Resources, 29:6, 725-737.

Contributor
Dianne Quigley, PhD is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Brown University’s Science and Technology Studies Program and can be contacted at Dianne_Quigley_1@brown.edu

This post may be cited as:
Quigley D. (2016, 22 August) Applying Place to Research Ethics and Cultural Competence Training.Research Ethics Monthly. Retrieved from: https://ahrecs.com/human-research-ethics/applying-place-research-ethics-cultural-competence-training