Ethical issues in research with refugees

Abstract

Refugee research ethics overlaps with and has drawn from ethics in humanitarian relief, anthropology and medical research. Ethics procedures and ethical practice need to be adapted to refugee settings to prevent unintentional harms and provide benefit to potential research participants who are highly vulnerable. Non-systematic review of published literature on ethics and ethical practice related specifically to conducting research among refugees. Researchers conducting studies with refugees may find that compliance with procedural ethics is straightforward but, in practice, encounter myriad issues of relational (or “micro”) ethics. These include how to obtain fully informed and genuinely voluntary consent, ensure confidentiality and participant anonymity, avoid unintentional harms, and fulfil the “dual imperative” of conducting methodologically rigorous research that provides reciprocal benefit to participants. Underlying all these issues is the asymmetric power relationship between researchers and refugees. Professionalism and reflexivity in the researcher's practice, establishing a researcher-participant relationship and ensuring meaningful participation in the research process are essential. It is the joint responsibility of all stakeholders in the research process to scrutinize every aspect of a research project to be conducted with refugees, thereby preventing sub-optimal or inadvertently unethical practices, but the individual researcher is ultimately responsible for ensuring that refugees derive benefit from the research to which they have contributed. Good ethical practice and methodological quality are mutually reinforcing goals. Although much progress has been made in improving ethical guidance for research among refugees, further development to define and guide best practice is needed.