Travis & Regina – Negotiating Research Ethics with Design

Travis is a graduate student in ecology and interested in doing his thesis research on water levels and the salmon run in Southern Oregon. In consultation with his advisor, Regina, she asserts the importance of exploring his research questions through community-engaged research. Regina informs Travis of the historical tensions in the region related to his topic and advises that he learn from the missteps and oversights of previous field researchers in the area. Regina recommends a research design in which Travis dialogues and consults with local cattle ranchers, environmentalists and indigenous stakeholders.

Travis appreciates Regina’s guidance, but is apprehensive that the added time associated with collaboration and consultation will prolong his time to graduation. Ultimately, Travis would prefer to bypass collaboration in the interest of efficiency.

When Travis asserts that he will forgo community-engaged research, Regina contends that such a bypass would be ethically dubious. Travis and Regina become heated in their disagreement and decide to take a week to reflect and reconvene. In that time, Regina shares literature with Travis and also consults with fellow faculty and graduate students who have successfully initiated community-engaged research.

Together they decide that the current research questions require consultation and collaboration with numerous stakeholders to maintain the integrity and rigor of Travis’s scholarly standards. As a result, they decide to amend Travis’s research focus and research questions to narrow the scope of his study, to allow for a more autonomous research project that matches Travis’s graduation timeline.

 

Key Take-Aways
  • The Issue: Travis and Regina disagree on whether Travis’s research questions require a community-engaged research approach, necessitating consultation and collaboration with diverse stakeholders.
  • The Deliberation: Recognizing their disagreement, the pair takes time to reflect and further research the matter. They reconvene and agree on the ethics of the research questions at hand, and the necessity for community-engaged research. Subsequently, they choose to rewrite the research protocol.
  • The Growth: The pair are able to discuss their difference of opinion and ultimately maintain their high ethical and scholarly standards by electing out of a project that would require consultation and collaboration with diverse stakeholders as Travis concluded that he could not complete the study ethically and congruently.