Friday 30 September 2016

On Research Ethics and Risk

On Wednesday I stole something from Coles.

(Would now be a good time to mention that this blog and the views expressed within are in no way affiliated with my university?)

I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t even realise I had done it until I got to my car and unloaded my bags, and noticed a tiny jar of pesto sitting at the bottom of the trolley that I had failed to put through the self-serve checkout.

And because I’m taking an intensive unit in social research ethics of course I started analysing the situation from different ethical perspectives.

For example, from a consequentialist perspective, which is concerned with the relative good and bad of the outcome of our actions, I might argue it was okay for me to accidentally take a little jar of pesto from Coles without paying for it because the relative good of the outcome - I, a poor-arse student, saved $4 that I could spend on a cup of coffee for the advancement of my research - is greater than the relative bad - Coles, a multi-million dollar company, lose out on $4.

Whereas from a virtue perspective, which is concerned primarily with the character of the people doing the actions, I was maybe a little at fault in not noticing the jar of pesto (is ‘being observant’ a virtue?), and was much more at fault in being too lazy to do something about it afterwards. 

I decided to take the consequentialist perspective.

(By the way, it occurs to me that someone in Coles HQ must have done a crap tonne of calculations to work out how much they save by installing self-serve checkouts, compared to the loss incurred by every slightly dishonest customer checking out their entire trolley contents as ‘potatoes - $1.99/kg.’)

But that’s not a very interesting ethical question. A much more interesting question, that I’ve been thinking a lot about, has to do with who assumes the risk of human research and just what the hell is informed consent.

Let’s use a hypothetical example of New York crack dealers because: social science. I want to interview a bunch of NY crack dealers about their crack habits and social networks. I approach them and they agree in principle. We negotiate some form of consent to conduct the interview, on a number of conditions:

1) the participants can withdraw at any time. That’s standard ethical practice.
2) the particiants can vet the interview transcript afterwards; and that’s also not an uncommon practice.

Under both conditions, I as the researcher assume the risk that my participants might choose to stop the interview, and that they might censor all the good stuff. I think that’s fair.

But there is another condition that can be negotiated as part of consent:

3) the participants can veto any analysis and subsequent publication.

If we include this condition, I assume the risk that my participants may not like how I interpret what they said, and will veto my entire project.

If we don’t include this condition, my participants assume the risk that I may come to conclusions about their personal lives that are actually upsetting. Which is entirely possible, even if they’ve approved the contents of the interview transcript.





Does the risk of researching humans rest on the researcher, or the humans?

And is it even possible to give fully informed consent to participate in a project if you’re not able to foresee all possible final analyses?

Is it okay for the possible benefits of your research to veto the right of humans to protect their own stories and present themselves in the way they want? Does it make a difference if you’re a research hack publishing only on your own blog, or if you have the backing of an entire institution? What about the political and social factors of your participant community and your relationship with them? What about if your participants are far-right neo-Nazis?

The practical answer for most social scientists is that we’re going to do our best to analyse and report on our findings in such a way that gels with our own academic background and that is probably concordant with our research participants. Unless we think they’re wrong (whatever that means) and deserve to be publicly outed. But even if we’re sympathetic to our participants, I don’t think as a rule we tend to make our analyses and publications conditional on the approval of our participants - not least for logistical reasons.

Is this right? Is this ethical? Do we just keep asking these questions?

Friday 23 September 2016

On Concision, Competition, and Being Enough: the 3 Minute Thesis

A couple of weeks ago I participated in the 3 Minute Thesis Competition Semi-Finals. (It’s great, the first round of presentations at UWA is literally the semi-finals and to get in all you have to do is sign up. Like a Certificate of Participation but even better.) It was probably one of my favourite experiences at uni this year and this is why.

Condensing your research - even when you’re just at the beginning - into three minutes is the ultimate minimalist design challenge. You know that minimalist rule, “only things you need or love”? Like that, on steroids. There’s also a rule I think that says you’re more creative when you have constraints. So writing a three minute talk (about 400 words) is this really zen kind of challenge where every word is important and you’re forced to think of new ways to express something even more succinctly and you surprise yourself and at the end you have this really lean, mean presentation. There’s just an intrinsic satisfaction in writing precisely and with punch.

Being able to explain your research to a general audience in three minutes also helps you to minimise your academic freakiness at parties and maximise your chance of getting dates. I mean, probably. For some of us there’s no hope.

I learnt my favourite piece of public speaking advice at the 3MT practice sessions, which is: pretend your audience is interested in what you’re saying. This doesn’t mean you don’t do the work to write or present an engaging talk. It just means you don’t have to be a bitch to yourself before you even begin: “Who would want to listen to me anyway? Why would I think I’m qualified to present to these people? What is even the point of me being born? etc. etc.” No. Your audience are there because they want to hear what you have to say, so say it.

The other really great thing about entering the 3MT competition is that you’re in a high-stress situation with a small group of other highly-stressed people who are feeling exactly what you’re feeling and therefore are incredibly supportive and generous and gracious with you. Which is kind of the opposite of competition.

Listen - I’m not going to tell you competition is bad. Striving for excellence is a good thing. (Didn't the UWA motto used  to be Achieve Excellence? Now it’s Pursue Impossible. I’m so conflicted.) But competition by default creates a condition of scarcity - there can only be one winner. Support, on the other hand - generosity and graciousness - those are unlimited. And when I didn’t make it to the finals I realised, for one of the few times in my life, my highly competitive self didn’t care. I was more than happy to bow out to every single one of the participants this year.

Maybe the antidote to the crushing weight of academic scarcity - never enough funding, never enough jobs, never enough time - is just to be unconditionally supportive of each other. Most of us won’t get the academic holy grail, but we can all be enough. I think that's a pretty great 3 minute thesis.

Friday 16 September 2016

On Leaving the Shallows

I’m doing a PhD because I want to have thoughts that last longer than a Facebook status update.

You guys, of all my flip one-line answers to the question “Why are you doing a PhD?”, that’s probably the closest to the truth.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m madly in love with my research topic. But couldn’t I have just read a book about it in a weekend? Instead, I’m relishing the opportunity to spend four fricking years thinking about it; and thinking about it deeply, from different angles, understanding it in different ways.

The idea of thinking about one big question for four years is so appealing to me, because I’m fighting to get my mind back.

Nicholas Carr writes in his excellent book, “The Shallows”:

“Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going - so far as I can tell - but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think.”

Don’t you just know that feeling?

My brain feels hyperactive, disconnected, fragmented, the way a computer hard drive gets fragmented, bits stored all over the place and none of them lining up. In fact I actually visualise the process of having longer thoughts as a defragmentation process, exactly like the gif that used to play in the Windows 97 defragmentation software, except that it’s the neurons in my brain re-configuring themselves so that they fire in longer and longer sequences, my thoughts being re-arranged until there’s a linear path all the way through.

Carr attributes this sense of mental change to the ubiquitousness of the Internet.  Which is not to be curmudgeonly, but to say simply that technology changes the way we think.

All technology changes the way we think: maps made us start thinking of the world cartographically, clocks had us dividing our lives into segments of time. The introduction of writing  - crude marks on mud and walls - brought with it the possibility of storing information outside our memories, of working out the potential for conveying information to people who aren’t even in our own space and time. The invention of the book - perhaps the greatest technology of all  - led to longer and more developed thoughts, arguments with more complex structure, narratives transcribed in a way both literary and linear.

But - and this I think is the crux of Carr’s argument - the internet isn’t linear. It does not promote linear thought. The internet is a web of hyperlinks and interconnectivity - before you’ve finished with one idea, you’ve opened pages on three others.

And it’s not just the medium that has changed - it’s not just that we now read newspapers on line, translated faithfully from print to pixel. The content of the medium is changing too. It’s being produced in increasingly smaller chunks, unbundled from each other. An album on iTunes is divided into its parts. A few pages of a book are available on Google. That’s all you need to get what you want - that one song, that one quote - disembodied from its original context.

My brain feels fragmented because through the technology of the internet I am dealing with information in a fragmented way. Some people laud this as a benefit - in the new world, we need to be able to attend to and sift and deal with all kinds of bits of information streaming past us and this is just a new skill that we’re learning.

But can we learn this new skill - can our brains adapt to this new way of processing information - without losing some of our capacity for long, linear, slow thoughts?

I'm discovering that doing a PhD involves many different kinds of thinking. A lot of it is necessarily non-linear: project management involves attending to a myriad different, hyperconnected demands - proposals, applications, emails, negotiations - in a way that adapting my mind to deal with the internet has equipped me for.

But I’ve also spent the first six months of my PhD reading journal articles and books - books! - all the way through, from start to end, in a linear fashion, everything bundled together and in its context - and my mind is starting to feel just a little bit more whole.

Nicholas Carr (2010) 'The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains', published by W.W. Norton and Company