An honours student approached me to interview me on an interesting thesis she is writing currently entitled "The conceptualization of political participation by advocates of Government 2.0". Naturally enough I agreed to what turned out to be an excellent interview (I do like it when people actually 'get' what I'm saying even if it's a bit subtle, a bit conceptual). The distinction between government and politics is a difficult one and something that I've given quite a bit of thought to, even though it only appears implicitly, and even then very sotto voce in the Taskforce report.
Anyway, before the interview could take place I was asked to fill out this form (pdf).
One of the reasons I have always steered clear of academia is this kind of petty minded nonsense - which in my day manifested itself not so much in this sort of thing but in the creation of endless rules around courses. Because I funded myself through uni I was forever coming across problems, for instance for deferring my course or switching from this to that, which would have been OK if I'd been on some funding arrangement (Why? No reason, but it had different rules). The way I was brought up I had a kind of naive belief that when presented with the idiocy of it all, the academics would do what they could to make sensible things happen. After all, they were devoting the best part of their waking hours to the rational exercise of the mind.
Alas . . .
Some of the best minds in the country apparently have nothing better to do than to sit around and administer the filling out of consent forms of people who have agreed to an interview . . . . Then again, perhaps it's some bureaucrat or politician sitting somewhere else. Anyway, it wasn't too bad. I told the student that I gave her all the permissions she would like and did not want to sign the form, and that was OK. And I enjoyed the interview.
So if you'd been full and frank in an interview with a research student, assuming that it was anonymous, but a couple of years later your remarks were used for wholly other purposes like say.... the guts of a 4 Corners story, that's cool? Maybe so.
Anyway it reads like a pretty bog standard consent form which ethics panels mandate in the medical sciences as a minimum requirement. It may have just been cut and paste directly across as is into this social science research you've been a part of. So paradoxically, I suspect some of the best minds in the country haven't given it too much thought at all.
oh nick
ever the offside contrarian.
evidently, clearly, obviously, manifestly, oral consent is not sufficient. Have a wee think about reversibility and about the extremities of experimental psychology, and the vagaries of interviwing contrary bastards like us.
I think you'll find it's all deemed to be for legal reasons, and that one is comparatively mild. Where I work, for example, we have lines like "whilst this survey is legal in Australia, the content may be illegal in other countries" and "although this is considered harmless, there may be minority groups in the community....". Then you actually do the survey/task/interview and you find out that it's about something entirely innocuous like your attitudes to having pets in the home.
If I was you, I would at least take the consent form down for her sake (she's too easy to identify). If the ethics people at my university found out you ran a study without getting consent, you would (a) get some form of severe disciplinary action; (b) not be allowed to submit your thesis; (c) possibly get kicked out of your course; and (d) if you didn't, have troubles for the rest of your life running anything.
Yes, there are lots of people that can think of nothing better than using their power to make misery for other people, and find officious ways to justify it . But that's not restricted to universities -- they're just epi-centres of bureaucracy and bored make-work bureaucrats.
It's an interesting point. As the commodification of education deepened, so too did its bureacratisation.
bureaucratisation!
C-sez, Shane. Thanks for your comments. They certainly seem reasonable when you read them - so long as you don't actually try to work out why they apply in this case. But that's bureaucratic logic for you. Something must be done. This is something. Something must be seen to be done. This involves filling in a form, therefore it has been seen to be done.
Conrad, I obtained her consent to the post. It was the ethical thing to do. And I didn't need a form or routine to go through.
I know the student's lecturer and he's definitely not a bureaucrat! You can read the form as communicating to you the legitimacy of the research, as a matter of courtesy. It appears that they didn't submit the project to the university's ethics committee, which they were obliged to do but appear to have avoided as the form isn't complete by their standards. Consider yourself lucky that bureaucracy was actually averted!
Nick, I beg to differ. I don't regard the concept of personal privacy as embodied in the Privacy Act and the National Privacy Principles as "petty minded nonsense". Before an organisation collects personal information from an individual, it is required to disclose the information that is being collected and what the information will be used for and whether the information will be provided to other people. The individual's consent must be obtained, preferably in writing.
I suspect that you,like all of us, have signed many privacy consents before and that a well-known mortgage broking business has asked many people to sign privacy forms.
Ron,
I wasn't suggesting any person in particular was a bureaucrat. I was suggesting that the process was.
Fred,
Yes, we do all that stuff of getting consents. It's the law. We also advise people that variable interest rates . . . vary. Because we are required to.
That is we explain that variable rates are not fixed. Fixed rates are fixed.
In case you're interested, I attach our entire disclosure at the bottom of ALL emails that we send people below (It's an old one, but the current one would just have the numbers adjusted). Of course it's completely dysfunctional, and no-one to my knowledge reads it, but we've disclosed what we were required to and the caravan moves on.
The result of a lot of the privacy regulation is not to improve people's privacy, but the endless obtaining of absurd consents. I wonder how many thousands of hours are taken up by people being warned that they are going to be recorded and telling them that if they don't want to be recorded they should say so. All this is unnecessary if there is some satisfactory process by which the recording is treated as a private thing until it is destroyed. In fact I expect the privacy regulation itself would permit this, but these procedures get built into routines in any event.
When I'm rung up for a survey I often agree to do it so long as they desist from all the permissions they have to read through. For a 5-10 minute survey it's often about one minute of permissions. And yet it's obvious what they want - they want you to answer their questions and then be able to report anonymised results. If they're not after anything more, (and I can't imagine any polling organisation being after anything more) what exactly are they getting permission for?
Yet we have to go through the same routine again and again.
I too think that we should provide what protection we can for people's privacy and other rights. This is a completely farcical way to do it.
"I know the student’s lecturer"
It's not the lecturers -- it's the committees and officious a**holes that often populate them. I personally couldn't care less about a lot of the forms either, as they remind of all the crazy signs you see on things now warning you of any possible possibility -- and I agree with NG above that a lot of it is "the endless obtaining of absurd consents" and not a realistic appraisal of the type of information people should be given if they participate in your study.
That doesn't mean I think we shouldn't have these sorts of consent forms, it's just that they've gone too far. Some of my friends, for example, look at how the visual system works by doing things like getting people to judge which way gaussian blobs move in different luminance conditions (i.e., judging flickery crap), yet they still have to get people to sign these forms saying that if something happens, they won't be responsible. That's about the equivalent of asking people to sign a form indemnifying them in case interference from their TV jumps out of the screen and attacks them.