While valuable research is taking place at South Africa’s universities, the challenge is to ensure that it occurs within a culture of respect for human rights, while universities need to ensure that they monitor research practices in accordance with their ethics protocol.
This is according to Jody Kollapen, chairperson of the South African Human Rights Commission, who recently delivered a lecture on Human Rights, Ethics and Research at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s education faculty on the Edgewood campus.
Kollapen said: “If universities had proactive monitoring regimes, they would be able to pick up problems without waiting for complaints from people being researched.” He explained that the universities’ ethics committees tended to approve protocols and the monitoring of the actual research process ended there. “There needs to be ongoing monitoring of the research process as often research participants are not aware when the ethics protocol is violated.”
Kollapen said researchers need to build trust with the communities they study and they should respect issues of confidentiality and privacy. “Researchers change the names of the people they are researching, without realising that it is easy to identify them. The issue of confidentiality needs to be protected.”
He explained that most research participants are unaware of their rights, especially their right not to answer intrusive questions.
He cited the relationship between the “researcher” and the “subject” as an example of how human rights are violated. On paper, all “participants” are referred to as “subjects” rather than as people with emotions and identity. Kollapen explained that even the language used in research papers did not acknowledge or respect human rights.
Academic researchers sometimes, by virtue of the fact that they are in a position of “authority” in the research process, look down on the “participants” in their research, often to the point where they become nonentities. This is a violation of human rights, he said.
He added that researchers should be more aware of the power they carry. “Often, in research relationships, there are power dimensions that exist. The researchers are generally middle-class and educated while the researched are the poor,” he said.
Kollapen stressed that people should be made aware of their rights as participants and that there should be a meaningful outcome of the research for these participants.
“It is the responsibility of the researcher to disseminate his or her findings back to the people he or she has researched,” he said.
He questioned whether the value of some research is justified by its outcome. The purpose of a research grant should be to create greater good in society through that research.
This outcome is unfortunately not always the sole intended goal for some. Kollapen said many academics choose personal advancement as the sole motivating factor in conducting research and that others abused donor funding by getting access to funds through research that is not properly motivated in terms of morals and values. In many instances, international donor funds for specified research was driving the agenda, he said.
“Universities have a duty to the public to be credible and produce credible, accurate, fair and non-discriminatory research. The issue is that every academic conducting research should be accountable for his or her actions and that means taking the proper steps and carefully thinking about the consequences of every step or phase of a research project,” he said.