Search

Objective: Non-native English speaking workers with a mild work-related traumatic brain and/or head injury are a vulnerable and underrepresented population in research studies. The researchers present their experiences with recruiting and performing qualitative interviews with non-native English speaking individuals with a work-related mild traumatic brain injury, and provide recommendations on how to better include this vulnerable population in future research studies. This paper presents considerations regarding ethics, recruitment challenges, interview preparation and debriefing, sex & gender and language and cultural issues must be made when working with this vulnerable population., Results: The researchers discuss critical issues and provide recommendations in recruiting and engaging with non-native English language workers including ethics, recruitment challenges, interview preparation and debriefing, sex & gender and language, and cultural considerations that must be made when working with this population. The study recommendations advise investigators to spend more time to learn about the non-native English participants in the mild wrTBI context, to be familiar with the vulnerabilities and specific circumstances that these workers experience. By increasing their awareness of the challenging facing this vulnerable population, the intention is to provide better care and treatment options through evidence-based research and practice.

Ethical tensions exist regarding the value and practice of acknowledging Indigenous contributions in community-based participatory research (CBPR). Semistructured phone interviews with researchers documented their perspectives on authorship in the scholarly dissemination of their community-based participatory Indigenous research. Thematic analysis resulted in four key ideas: (1) current practices regarding methods of acknowledging community contributions; (2) requirements for shared authorship with individual versus collective/community partners; (3) benefits to sharing authorship with collective/community partners; and (4) risks to sharing authorship with collective/community partners. Findings suggest an emerging but inconsistent practice.

Background: Research ethicists have recently declared a new ethical imperative: that researchers should communicate the results of research to participants. For some analysts, the obligation is restricted to the communication of the general findings or conclusions of the study. However, other analysts extend the obligation to the disclosure of individual research results, especially where these results are perceived to have clinical relevance. Several scholars have advanced cogent critiques of the putative obligation to disclose individual research results. They question whether ethical goals are served by disclosure or violated by non-disclosure, and whether the communication of research results respects ethically salient differences between research practices and clinical care. Empirical data on these questions are limited. Available evidence suggests, on the one hand, growing support for disclosure, and on the other, the potential for significant harm., Methods: This paper explores the implications of the disclosure of individual research results for the relationship between research and clinical care through analysis of research-based cancer genetic testing in Ontario, Canada in the late 1990s. We analyze a set of 30 interviews with key informants involved with research-based cancer genetic testing before the publicly funded clinical service became available in 2000., Results: We advance three insights: First, the communication of individual research results makes research practices seem like clinical services for our respondents. Second, while valuing the way in which research enables a form of clinical access, our respondents experience these quasi-clinical services as inadequate. Finally, our respondents recognize the ways in which their experience with these quasi-clinical services is influenced by research imperatives, but understand and interpret the significance and appropriateness of these influences in different ways., Conclusion: Our findings suggest that the hybrid state created through the disclosure of research results about individuals that are perceived to be clinically relevant may produce neither sufficiently adequate clinical care nor sufficiently ethical research practices. These findings raise questions about the extent to which research can, and should, be made to serve clinical purposes, and suggest the need for further deliberation regarding any ethical obligation to communicate individual research results.

In this article, the authors highlight some benefits of and barriers to doing qualitative research in association with hospital-based services. They first describe an ongoing qualitative research project that involves interviewing women about their post-sexual assault medicolegal experiences in hospital-situated sexual assault centers across a large Canadian province. Their methodological journey led them to engage program coordinators at these centers to assist with locating participants and qualified interviewers, and with negotiating the demands of their respective research ethics boards. They outline the ways in which their project was shaped, positively and negatively, by working with them in medical institutions. They conclude by recommending that hospitals and hospital ethics boards counteract tendencies toward paternalism by recognizing the value of feminist qualitative research contributions to the activities of their own sexual assault centers and to the recovery of sexually assaulted women. Such recognition might be productively engaged by adopting an ethics-in-process approach.