In this paper we argue the need to reimagine research ethics frameworks to include notions of environmental sustainability. While there have long been calls for healthcareethics frameworks and decision-making to include aspects of sustainability, less attention has focused on howresearchethics frameworks could address this. To do this, we first describe the traditional approach to research ethics, which often relies on individualised notions of risk. We argue that we need to broaden this notion of individual risk to consider issues associated with (...) environmental sustainability. This is because research is associated with carbon emissions and other environmental impacts, both of which cause climate change health hazards. We introduce how bioethics frameworks have considered notions of environmental sustainability and draw on these to help develop a framework suitable for researchers. We provide a case study of data-driven health research to apply our framework. (shrink)

Social science research, whether observational or interventional, is confronted with situations where the dignity of participants and respect for cultural practices can be seriously affected. The aim of this article is twofold. Firstly, we will reflect on the ethical challenges facing social science research with special consideration of research in contexts of vulnerability. Secondly, we will propose the Kantian sense of respect as a normative framework to guide social science research.

Most research ethics literature on vulnerability focuses on the vulnerability of individuals and populations defined by the potential vulnerability of their members. However, research involving human participants does not always take the individual as the unit of analysis: political experiments may apply an intervention to a community as a whole. This paper argues that community-level vulnerability is not reducible to the sum of the vulnerabilities of community members, and that there is thus a need to consider vulnerability at the community (...) level of analysis when analyzing the ethical implications of political field experiments. I first review ethical literature on community intervention research and the emerging scholarship on the ethics of political field experiments. I then highlight key accounts of the concept of vulnerability at an individual level. Drawing on Whitfield’s concept of “collective wrongs,” I argue that communities can be negatively affected in ways that are distinct from harms to individual community members, and that variation in susceptibility to such wrongs at the community level is largely consistent with existing conceptualizations of vulnerability. I suggest questions that researchers should consider when designing political field experiments to ensure that community-level vulnerabilities are taken into account. (shrink)