Gary Allen and Mark Israel reflect on constructive approaches to languages in human research and for research ethics committees.

Gary Allen and Mark Israel

Much human research is conducted in languages that are not the same as that used by the research ethics review body or the chief investigators. This can manifest in a number of ways including:

Recruitment and consent materials;
Data collection tools (surveys, interview instruments and observation matrices), and
Collected data.
return of results to participants

There is literature on the ethics of interpreting and translation (Drugan, 2017) as well as on the ethics of research in those fields (Tiselius, 2019). However, for our purposes, we want to focus on the first two situations…