Ethics Peer Review Panel

[dlevineBC]

Is your content request related to a problem? Please describe. There are no ethics review boards in the public service to conduct research with humans, like you would find in academia.

Describe the solution you'd like Ethics Peer Review Panel - when you start a research project you should gather different peers and talk about your approach to research. This would provide some outside perspective on taking an ethical approach rooted in our guidelines. Peers might be able to flag potential issues on complex topics or flag issues for inexperienced researchers. This should be a requirement for any projects involving vulnerable populations.

Additional context This might be done in other jurisdictions so I will do a jurisdiction scan

User Story As a user researcher I need an ethics review of my research plan so that I conduct my research in an ethical, safe and cultural appropriate manner.

[dlevineBC]

As part of this, we could look into requiring user researchers to go through the "Course on Research Ethics" from the Government of Canada. https://tcps2core.ca/welcome

[dlevineBC]

A set of questions to consider could be made to help researchers do a self assessment and to be used by the panel, for example:

• Are we treating our participants like people, not subjects?
• Are there opportunities to engage in more open and reciprocal ways?
• Are we considerate of the personal and cultural sensitivities that might prevail?
• Are we making good use of everyone’s time?