Abstract
In 1958, a young sociologist named Herbert Gans moved to Levittown, New Jersey, one of the iconic postwar suburban developments. Intending to study the suburb from its origins, Gans lived there for two years, attending meetings, talking to residents, and persuading the builder to mail questionnaires to other purchasers. Gans did not tell his neighbors that he was keeping notes on what they said to him, and he claimed to be writing history rather than sociology. Perhaps these tactics helped him gain candid information, for the resulting book, The Levittowners (1967) remains a classic study of why so many Americans seek suburban homes.
Four decades later, a Canadian student started spending summers working on a canal. Like Gans before him, he took notes about what he saw and experienced. So when it came time to propose a dissertation topic, he naturally sought to use his years of experience to write about his fellow canal workers as he continued to work alongside them. Unlike Gans, he needed approval from a university research ethics board, which fretted that “not only are individual workers vulnerable, but more important, this labour force as a collective is vulnerable” (p. 306). Though the board allowed him to talk to his coworkers so long as he explained that he was doing research, it forbade him from using the notes so painstakingly collected over the previous years. The student could not even draw on his own vivid memories of his first day on the job, out of fear they had been enriched by the forbidden notes (p. 182).
Sociologist Will van den Hoonaard offers this contrast as an example of what he calls the “homogenization and pauperization of social research” at the hands of ethics committees in Canada and other Anglophone countries (p. 235). His book both conveys his outrage at that trend and helps explain its persistence.
The Seduction of Ethics is a powerful, combined-arms assault on the system of ethics review of the social sciences. Van den Hoonaard estimates he communicated with 270 people in five countries, in contexts ranging from interviews to focus groups to conference chats to full-blown participant observation of five ethics boards in action. He has read a vast library of published accounts of the process (almost all of it negative about ethics review), and he has served on Canada’s Interagency Advisory Panel on Research Ethics.
Having gotten to know the present system better than anyone, van den Hoonaard finds little to admire. While he cites a British survey in which as many as 15 percent of social scientists described ethics review as a positive experience (p. 209), in his own research he found not a single social researcher “who said that complying with the ethics review process led him/her to more thoughtful, ethical research, and many saw the process as torturous” (p. 223). Though he respects “the helpful and sincere interest research-ethics committees have shown in research” (p. 7), he generally presents ethics-committee members as having been corrupted by the power they wield.
Ethics boards purport to be expert in research ethics, but van den Hoonaard challenges such claims. Few board members are professional ethicists, and many fail to read the basic policy documents that supposedly govern their work. A board’s decision on an individual case may depend more on who shows up to that meeting than on any deliberative process. But because they are unaccountable to researchers, boards easily slip into making “idiosyncratic and inconsistent decisions” (p. 176). A committee can forbid a project, decline to give a reason, and then refuse to meet with the researcher (p. 53).
More commonly, committees do not reject proposals outright. Instead, they may impose conditions that make the research difficult. Several researchers told of being forced to seek signatures on written consent forms, even when those forms offended the research participants they were supposed to protect. For their part, researchers rarely challenge committees directly. Instead, they adopt what van den Hoonaard (borrowing from Goffman) calls “secondary adjustments,” such as failing to report that an interview ran longer than the time limit arbitrarily imposed by the ethics board. In other words, ethics committees pretend to judge the ethics of social science, and social scientists pretend to obey the resulting demands.
More ominously, researchers shy away from what they have learned are controversial methods—particularly participant observation—and topics, including “research on vulnerable people, students studying children, pedophilia, Aboriginal research and child or wife abuse, minors, the use of medicinal (herbal) plants, sexuality, drug users, illegitimate activities, or infidelity among professors” (p. 262). Van den Hoonaard fears that such self-censorship will lead the social sciences to “wither away” (p. 286).
Ethics review is a polarizing topic, and it is hard to know if this book can win any converts. Those already skeptical of the process will find in it a stunningly thorough bibliography, a year’s supply of stories of stupid ethics-board decisions, and enough quantitative data to suggest that the horror stories are not anomalies. But can such evidence change the minds of those entrenched in an international ethics “industry” that pulls in hundreds of millions of dollars (p. 75) each year?
Indeed, The Seduction of Ethics has a pessimistic tone, suggesting that a new generation of researchers has come to accept as natural and inevitable a system that will keep them from doing their best work. Yet this gloom may reflect its authorship in the first decade of the twenty-first century, just before the edifice began to crack. Thanks in part to van den Hoonaard’s own efforts, in 2010 Canada revised its Tri-Council Policy Statement to acknowledge key differences between social science and biomedical research. And in 2011, the U.S. government issued a notice that may be the first step in the reconsideration of regulations that have remained stagnant for decades. The Seduction of Ethics went to press before the effects of these efforts could be known. Perhaps with such top-down reform, even those seduced by ethics can be made chaste again.