A critique of current practice: ten foundational guidelines for autoethnographers.

Any research is potentially compromised when researchers address ethical issues retrospectively rather than by anticipating these issues. In this regard, creative analytical practices (CAP) autoethnography has endemic problems. In Part 1 of this article, I detail a case study of an autoethnography in which journal reviewers insisted that an author gain retrospective informed consent from the 23 persons documented in an autoethnography.

Number-8-wire ethics: a New Zealand ethics committee's response to lengthy international clinical trial information sheets.

USA dominance of international clinical trials mandates complex and lengthy participant information sheets and limits the amount of scrutiny New Zealand ethics committees can have over information sheets form or content. This paper provides an alternative exemplar: a summary of a lengthy participant information sheet written in less than one page, inviting potential participants to read the lengthy document. The succinct invitation provides participants with sufficient information to decline to read the lengthy document or better informs the reading of the longer document.

If Ethics Committees were Designed for Ethnography.

WHERE DID THE ETHICS REVIEW PROCESS go wrong for qualitative research, and how can we make it right, or at least better? This paper begins with an excerpt from an ethnography of attempting to attend an ethics review-related workshop, which exemplifies that the ethics-review process is based on epistemological assumptions aligned with positivistic research, and does not fit the qualitative research process. We suggest that a new format for ethics review, based on assumptions associated with qualitative research and ethnography, might be a better fit. In this model the researcher becomes the expert and the committee the learner or ethnographer.

Unequal protection for patient rights: the divide between university and health ethics committees.

Despite recommendations from the Cartwright Report ethical review by health ethics committees has continued in New Zealand without health practitioners ever having to acknowledge their dual roles as health practitioners researching their own patients. On the other hand, universities explicitly identify doctor/research-patient relations as potentially raising conflict of role issues. This stems from the acknowledgement within the university sector itself that lecturer/research-student relations are fraught with such conflicts.

Informing consent in New Zealand research: researchers' conflict of interest and patient vulnerability.

The authors, members of two different regional health ethics committees, write about their observations evaluating ethics application where researchers' conflicts of interest go unacknowledged either when researching their own patients or when the research subjects experience a temporary vulnerability--i.e. they have learned they are to lose a body part such as a breast, bowel, or limb.