What’s at risk? Who’s responsible? Moving beyond the physical, the immediate, the proximate, and the individual

Allen, G. and Israel, M.ORCID: 0000-0002-1263-8699 (2018) What’s at risk? Who’s responsible? Moving beyond the physical, the immediate, the proximate, and the individual. Research Ethics Monthly, 1 February .

Abstract

To some extent, when researchers reflect upon those harms associated with a project, they may well limit their assessment of risk to the here and now and to identifiable individuals. In addition, for projects in the medical sciences, those risks were long understood as predominantly physical in the form of injury, infection or disability and related to direct participants (e.g. persons who received an experimental pharmacological agent). This limited vision is not particularly surprising. One of the perverse consequences of requiring researchers to reflect on whether the potential benefits of research justify risk to participants is that some researchers are dissuaded from looking too carefully for risks and therefore avoid developing strategies for minimising these risks and mitigating possible harms. Even more perversely, this reluctance can trigger in human research ethics committees an unrealistic level of risk aversion...

Item Type:	Non-refereed Article
Publisher:	Australasian Human Research Ethics Consultancy Services Pty Ltd (AHRECS)
Publisher's Website:	https://ahrecs.com/human-research-ethics/whats-ris...
URI:	http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/54880

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