Ethically Viable Research

A huge part of conducting research is applying for, and being granted ethics. Research needs to be ethical in order to be carried out, and supposedly approval takes a substantial amount of time. Many from the previous MDTA cohort, and my friends who have carried out their postgrad, have complained to me about the hideous process! However, we are considerably lucky that ethics is, hopefully, going to be granted to our cohort together.

This morning's job was to get the lowdown from the Ethics Team from uni about why application for ethics is incredibly important, and how they are able to assist you along the way. Although unlikely in our studies, there is a possibility to cause harm, long term damage, or affect the participants or researchers, but the aim for ethics is to minimise the likelihood of harm as much as possible. Check out the sketchnote I created as we were given the presentation this morning.

We were then given the difficult task to create an umbrella ethics application to submit together. As expected, this was difficult as we all have very different studies, thus have different methodologies, parameters, samples etc. We came to somewhat of an agreement by the end of the discussion, many conforming to the rest of the group in order to meet the blanket application. 

Although I still need to do a bit of thinking in the next week or so, my hope is my research will investigate student and teacher (myself) perception of the impact of blogging on learning, in my Year 11 PE class. I have a bit to redevelop after this morning, to fit under the ethics proposal, but I am both petrified and excited for what is to come! What this space...