Research Ethics
A Brief History of the CPSA’s Involvement

The first record of CPSA involvement in ethics issues was its response in 1975 to the Canada Council’s recent establishment of a Consultative Committee on Ethics with respect to research involving human subjects. The Council had asked all associations to comment on the issues facing the Committee. Two political scientists were on that Consultative Committee – J.A. Corry (Queen’s) and Gilles Lalande (Montréal). A key question was whether the CPSA should create a Code of Ethics, which might address research ethics but other professional ethics issues were discussed, including relations with government, employers, and students. At its November 1975 meeting the CPSA Board decided to establish a research policy committee to consider these issues.

The 1978 Report

The research policy committee provided its report in February 1978. It did not take a position on the advisability of creating a CPSA code of ethics. It noted “there still exists too many divergent views as to what could constitute an acceptable code of ethics for the profession and, on the other hand, the control which the CPSA could exert on its members remain minimal in that the latter do not require a permit to exercise their profession, contrarily to lawyers and physicians, for instance.” It did briefly set out some guiding principles that could be used should such a code be created. This included, for instance, “Enlightened consent: It belongs to the political scientist to keep the subjects of research fully informed of its nature, object, risks and benefits in order to allow them to decide in full awareness whether they wish to participate in the research or not.”

The report also recommended the creation of a CPSA Standing Committee of Professional Ethics that would have an advisory and educational rather than a regulatory responsibility. The models being pursued at the American Political Science Association and the Canadian Society of Sociology and Anthropology were noted as examples.

A prominent concern in the report was with the effects of government contract research and Donald D. Rowat’s article “The Decline of Free Research in the Social Sciences”, (Canadian Journal of Political Science, December 1976) was cited. However the committee noted that scholars were divided about the costs and benefits of such research and the committee limited itself to recommending that the CPSA encourage further research on the effect of contracts on research.

The 1980s

In 1980 the CPSA Board decided that it was better to set up a mechanism to respond to ethics initiatives at the Canada Council rather than to engage in creating a broad detailed code of ethics which might overlap, for instance, with existing structures at the University level. Having such a mechanism was seen as important to ensure that the Canada Council and Social Science Federation of Canada (SSFC) initiatives would not be inconsistent with the interests of political scientists. Potential differences with other disciplines, for instance psychology, were noted. In the first half of the 1980s representatives to the relevant SSFC committee were appointed (Rianne Mahon, followed by Linda Freeman) and the linkage was seen as valuable, but over the course of the decade concern about research ethics issues waned as it was felt that the ethics research clearance rules were sufficiently simple as not to pose a problem.

The Tri-Council Initiative in the mid 1990 to 2002

In the mid 1990s social scientists raised a significant number of expressions of concern about the inappropriateness of certain elements of the draft Tri-Council guidelines for their disciplines. These concerns persisted as the Tri-Council guidelines developed. In a 2002 multidisciplinary consultation on the guidelines organized by the HSSFC and the Interagency Advisory Panel on Research Ethics (PRE) these concerns were reiterated and the possibility of restricting the Tri-Council Policy guidelines to a general statement that would be supplemented by disciplinary codes was discussed by some attendees. Problems with the application of the Tri-Council Policy Statement that were noted included variation across Research Ethics Boards (REBs), a clinical bias, the inappropriateness of written consent in some situations, the difficulty of specifying lists of questions in advance, instances of apparent excessive REB attention to methodology, timing problems for graduate students, the concern about the deterrent effect on graduate students of doing empirical research, the appropriateness of the procedures for aboriginal communities, and the concern that there would be a tendency of the mandate of the ethics regime to be unduly extended. There was, however, some optimism that these concerns would be taken up and addressed by the PRE.

Source: CPSA files