Abstract:

Research and professional ethics are an integral part of every psychology degree, as this is seen as a key graduate outcome for students leaving to become clinicians working with clients and patients. The development of these skills are embedded in teaching, but they culminate in the final year of a degree when final year students must gain formal ethical approval for their final research project. Decisions as to the ethical appropriateness of research are made by a departmental research ethics committee, which considers all research projects carried out by staff or students within the department. One of the challenges of this practice is the scale of work involved for committee members (Doyle & Buckely, 2014), who are all faculty members, and the tracking of applications and decisions alongside the quality assurance required to ensure that all application are treated fairly and equally. The time involved in performing this work is often underestimated by universities, and the variety and complexity of decisions requires extensive discussion and negotiation. Traditionally, these decisions are reached by committee discussions, however this presents logistical difficulties as requires meetings with quorate attendance. The University of Westminster launched a virtual tool in 2014 to facilitate the management of the research ethics committee and help to track the progress of applications, and to allow discussions to occur and be managed virtually. The psychology department adopted the tools in September 2014 to deal with all ethics applications. Here we report on how this virtual committee has affected the role and practices of a working committee that deals with over 300 applications per year, and how an online ethics procedure has facilitated an integrated developmental approach to ethical education.

Keywords:

Ethics, REC, Virtual committee.