[MUSIC] Hi, in this module I'm going to talk about some of the special concerns that arise when we conduct international research related to social science. So when we conduct research abroad, overseas, the standards for the protection of research subjects actually are the same as for when we conduct research at home. We're not somehow relaxed or exempted from the basic standards that we have to follow if we're conducting research in our home location. So in most countries, IRB should subject research to be conducted abroad to the same level of scrutiny as research conducted domestically. It may even be subjected to a higher level of scrutiny, to ensure that there is no abuse of the system, or other concerns that may arise with conducting international research. Review normally considers the implications of local context. So the review will normally account for the fact that actually the standards with respect to people's concerns, the things they worry about, maybe differ when we go abroad, than when we are at home. What might be considered risky in one setting might not be considered risky in another. So one of the key areas in which there's variation from one country or region to another is in terms of what sorts of things are sensitive topics. So apparently innocuous questions in some settings may be very sensitive in other settings. So politics and religion may be particularly sensitive in particular countries. So questions about people's opinions about the government, particular political parties, their religious affiliation. In one setting, they might be totally routine and considered not sensitive at all. They might even be the sorts of things that people post on the web on their profiles. In other countries, other regions, those same answers might expose people to considerable risk of discrimination or even physical harm. So certain behaviors as well that are routine in some contexts may be stigmatized in others. So something like alcohol consumption, which is routine in many countries of course, is unacceptable or forbidden in other societies. So care should always be taken when asking about such issues according to the aspect of whether or not they are sensitive in a particular setting. And it may be that certain kinds of questions simply cannot be asked, because the risk that they would pose to the participants would be too high. Extra care in those settings should also be taken to store and secure the data. So especially in a setting where people might be at substantial risk of even physical harm if certain personal details about their behavior or their opinions became known. Then we have to take the same standards that we apply, perhaps in our own country, and follow them even more rigorously. We have to make sure that USB sticks, hard drives are encrypted. That we don't take any chance that somehow somebody could be identified, and then their answers linked back to them, putting them at great risk for say, admitting some unhappiness with a particular political party, or a government. Or expressing affiliation with a religion that is not actually widespread in their particular country or setting. So confidentiality, as I just alluded to, is a very special concern, and we have to be aware that in some settings, in some environments, the legal and political climate may make it difficult to maintain confidentiality. Even when we've secured a hard drive, that we've done everything we can to prevent the accidental release of data, there are still risks. Now in the United States, many other countries, law enforcement and the courts mostly respect the confidentiality commitments made by social science researchers, when they are interviewing subjects. There are cases where researchers have collected information from subjects about participation in illegal behavior. And for the most part, as far as I know, for the most part, courts and law enforcement have not seized such information to use against subjects in courts. There may be some very rare exceptions. But generally this principle has been accepted that the courts and law enforcement respect the importance of social science research and have been willing to not go after such data, even when it might be useful to them to help make a criminal case. Elsewhere though, authorities may demand access to data. And there may be no legal recourse to prevent giving them the data that they ask for. And respondents in some settings maybe seen at risk as a result of being seen talking to researchers. So the very fact of perhaps being approached by a researcher and telling that researcher that no, they don't want to participate in the study. If that person is reported on by a third party, goes to the authorities and say, well, there's a researcher here who went and talked to so and so, I don't know what they said. That anonymous or perhaps not anonymous denunciation to the authorities could put somebody at risk. So these are some things that we have to care about. The other issue is that there a lot of places where the security of computers and the connections on which we store or transmit data may be a real issue. There are some places where the moment you connect to a public Wi-Fi or you plug in a USB drive that somebody has handed you. Within seconds your computer may be compromised and security agencies may have access to your hard drive or the contents of your emails. In those situations, you have to think very seriously about whether you're even capable of preserving confidential information about your subjects. Now the definition of a research subject can also change in different settings. In the United States and most countries, not all, only the living are considered research subjects. So, in other settings however, the deceased may be accorded privacy rights. So to clarify this, in the United States, normally, in fact almost always, research on people who are already dead, making use of what used to be confidential information while they were still alive. Once they're dead, they do not enjoy any right to privacy and they're not considered human subjects. There's normally no human subjects review required for studying people who are already deceased. So for example, when I study people in 18th and 19th century China, it's not considered human subjects research. Because in fact, all the people I study have already passed away, they've been dead for decades or centuries. Now in other settings, there are, as I said, situations where people think that the deceased may be accorded at least privacy rights or that their reputation may have some right not to be harmed. You have to think about that. So access in these settings, access to data on the deceased may be restricted on the grounds that it may harm their reputation. So for example if there are household registers or police records that identify people as criminals or engaged in illicit or stigmatized behavior, access to those archives may be limited or forbidden, well after the people involved have passed away. There are also cases in some countries where living descendants of people recorded in historical documents assert a right to privacy, a right to the preservation of their reputation, because they're worried that information made public about their deceased ancestors might harm their current reputation. So, for example, household registers that perhaps in the early part of the 20th century identified people as drug users, or sex workers, or criminals. The grandchildren or the great grandchildren of those people may object to the use or the analysis of such data on the grounds that the fact that they had such a ancestor might somehow affect their current reputation. Now, these are situations that don't always come up in IRB review. Because IRBs in different countries may not be aware of the particularities of particular societies, but they're probably ones that you'll have to think about when you're assessing what you're going to do in a particular setting. Now, another very complex topic that sometimes comes up in research on foreign settings, but sometimes even in domestic settings, is that sometimes people feel like the reputation of communities or groups or political leaders may be an issue. Even if the privacy or the confidentiality of individual participants are preserved and that all the data are anonymized. So there are settings where people as a group may object to research being conducted on members of that group for fear that information may be revealed that somehow impairs or affects the reputation of the group. Or the leader of a particular community may object to research being carried out in that community, on the grounds that the results of the research may harm their reputation, or harm their career. Now again, such issues are not normally the purview of the IRB, but they may be practical considerations when it comes to trying to figure out how you're actually going to conduct your study. Now other issues come up when it comes to proprietary data, especially in international settings. So in the United States and elsewhere, most government agencies, non-profits, universities, corporations have fairly well developed procedures for granting access to data. People have been doing it for several decades. There are standard legal agreements, boilerplate agreements that people sign where the expectations about what can be done with the data, whether it can be shared with others and so forth are made very clear. And also the penalties associated with misuse of the data are spelled out. And also individual employees typically do not have the right to leak or share say corporate or government agency data on their own. However, in other settings, the guidelines, the standards may not be well developed and you need to approach some situations with tremendous caution. So you need to be wary of any data that may be provided to you on a personal basis by an individual employee working for a government agency. Or a company where there is in fact, no evidence that they actually had formal approval to share the data with you. So for example, the bank employee offering to share information about their customers with you simply because you're their friend, not because the bank has formally approved sharing the data with you. That's extremely dangerous and almost certainly reflects a real problem that might come up with an IRB or might land you in considerable difficulty as you move forward. So be wary of these situations where the standards are not yet well defined. There's also international issues that come up when it comes to housing data that have been collected. So many countries, for very good reason, require that data remain there for analysis in storage and not be taken outside the country. So this is especially the case for biomarker data, blood samples, physical measurements, studies conducted, biological samples, blood etc, drawn in hospitals. These are in many societies subject to special restrictions where they cannot be physically removed from the country to be analyzed elsewhere. That they have to be left in country and analyzed there. Original sources, archival materials, identifying data are also likely to be restricted. Many archival materials, the physical original materials in most cases for obvious reasons, cannot be removed from the archives. Perhaps they can be transcribed in the archives or photographed but the originals have to remain there. So protocols in some cases, they also require that local institutions act as a custodian for sensitive data and that analysis be conducted on site. That data, even after it's turned into a database, may not be removed from the county, that it has to be analyzed there subject to the guidelines, the principles that emerge in that particular country. So, here I've outlined some of the complexities that can arise with conducting international research. If you go to the IRB with a proposal to conduct international or overseas reasearch, you'll almost certainly be subject to greater scrutiny because of these sorts of concerns.
