Asking about Violence: Improving Ethics in Violence Research

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This project will investigate the impact on research participants and staff of participating in research about violence. The goal of the project is to inform and facilitate ethical decision-making in research that involves asking about violence. The project will result in the development of a best-practices handbook that combines data and practical suggestions to minimize harm and maximize benefits for participants when conducting research on political violence. The project will build a network of scholars and practitioners for advancing ethical practices across research sites, as well as a training module for graduate students on ethical considerations for research on political violence. The project will yield a useful resource for researchers, educators, ethicists, policy makers, and public and private organizations.The aim of this project is to collect evidence to inform standards and best practices for ethical decision-making in data collection on the topic of violence. Specifically, the project aims to: i) generate generalizable evidence on the harms, benefits, and regret associated with participating in violence research for both respondents and interviewers; and ii) develop new guidance for researchers across disciplines and other research stakeholders for how to make informed decisions about the potential costs and benefits of research on political violence. The project will include a systematic review of the existing evidence on asking about violence, a multi-site field experiment in diverse communities at risk for political violence, and a survey of interviewers who routinely ask respondents about their experiences with violence. The findings will be used to create a handbook of recommended practices related to ethics in research on violence. The project will have implications for how researchers and stakeholders, such as ethics boards and journal editors, assess and maximize beneficence for violence research in the social and behavioral sciences.This project was funded through the ER2 program by the SBE and the BIO directorates.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.