Description
National research ethics guidelines form the benchmark for research institutions and institutional review boards (IRBs) to assess the ethical acceptability of academic research. They provide advice on all manner of ethical research practices, including how to conduct research with vulnerable participants. Despite their centrality in setting ethical standards, there has been little attention to how these documents conceptualize vulnerability, and in particular how this stands to shape ethical review for qualitative social scientists. Our article, therefore, conducts a systematic study of the national-level ethics requirements for 44 countries across the global North and South, examining how they use and define the concept of vulnerability, the specific groups or categories they seek to protect, and what this reveals about their assumptions about research purpose and practice. The conclusions show that much as we may wish to reform national-level guidelines to recognise more relational, contextual, and dynamic understandings of vulnerability, such a reform can only be meaningful if paired with a much more significant overhaul of a regulatory structure premised largely on assumptions drawn from biomedical research.
