Researcher Safety and Welfare

Abstract

In Australia, as elsewhere, the safety and welfare of researchers is a neglected area of human research ethics and integrity. Historically, Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs) and researchers have necessarily focused on the risk of harm to participants. But there is increasing awareness of the need to consider physical, emotional, and other potential harms to researchers, especially in ‘risk-saturated’ social spaces. In this short chapter, we seek to bring researcher safety and welfare to the fore. We focus on physical harms, emotional harms, and professional and reputational harms, and set out some practical ways to manage these. We argue that researcher safety should (a) be a fundamental prerequisite to the research endeavour, (b) be considered upfront and throughout the research process by researchers, administering and funding bodies, and HRECs, and (c) be explicitly included in ethics application forms. Show more