INFORMATION SHEET 3
ETHICS AND THE SFF PROJECTS
WORKING WITH SFLEX
The Australian Institute of Family Studies Ethics Committee has approved SFLEX to provide action research evaluation training and support to SFF projects, including clearance to collect and analyse data. As part of this, SFLEX needs to give your project team documentation on ethics. SFLEX may only provide action research support when you make sure your work is ethical by:
Making sure people freely
agree to participate in the project
Informing everyone participating
in your project about the purpose, nature, risks and benefits of the action
research
Having processes in place
to make sure information is kept private and confidential. This must
be detailed in an information statement
Making sure people can make
a complaint if they are unhappy about the research process
Making the research available
to everyone involved at the end of the project
Involving as many people
as possible in working out what to research on and how this should be done
Involving people in collecting,
making sense of and distributing the findings of the research
Making sure that project
asks for help from interpreters or other people with local research knowledge
if it is needed
Paying people for their
time and costs, where possible, but not so much that it induces them to participate
Referring people on to other
agencies if the work of the project or the action research upsets them (hopefully
it wont!)
Making sure that projects
have policy and procedures for reporting child abuse and neglect should the
research lead to a disclosure

