HUMAN RESEARCH ETHICS COMMITTEES: Friend or Foe?

Although researchers commonly make up most of the members, the relationship between researchers and Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs) is fraught. Indeed, it is not uncommon for researchers to express a degree of resentment at the way in which HRECs go beyond ‘ethics’ and commonly stray into matters of methodology or other areas of research governance. Those who sit on HRECs, or who provide administrative support, commonly consider such expansions in scope to be justified and generally perceive their efforts as directed towards the improvement of research proposals. Indeed, such is the belief that ethical review improves research that as Shaw argued in 2011, HREC input might justify authorship on any resulting outputs. While HRECs might consider themselves to be ‘critical friends’ to researchers, researchers continue to see HRECs as bodies that are all too inclined to overstep their remits but must nevertheless be appeased. This chapter critically examines these contrasting points of view. Acknowledging that the institutional imperatives that implicitly motivate HRECs are not those of research ethics per se but matters of research governance, I suggest that HRECs are neither friends nor foes of researchers and that the relationship is far more complex and ambivalent for such terms.