238 Ethics in Higher Education: Values-driven Leaders for the Future
the principles of informed consent, confidentiality and anonymity (Neale
and Bishop, 2012; Tilley and Woodthorpe, 2011). The latest technology
has made partially possible re-identification of de-identified data
(Wilbanks, 2014), and so the protection of privacy is not absolutely
guaranteed by making data anonymous. For data with personal
information or from research participants, consent obtained at the point
of data collection is not “once-and-for-all” (Grinyer, 2009). Renewed
consent is needed for other research. A practical problem which arises
lies in the difficulty of obtaining such consent in terms of reaching the
participants and requiring them to give consent repeatedly for research
in future.
Such problems have been encountered by the Open University of
Hong Kong in supporting academics’ research and disseminating
research data. For example, research that involves the provision of
distance counselling through the Internet has presented difficulties, such
as crossing jurisdictions when the subjects are located in other countries,
verifying participants’ identities, and validating consent. Relevant legal
and regulatory requirements have to be reviewed to ensure that none of
them are violated. Procedures such as electronic signatures can be
considered for obtaining consent online in countries where the use of
conventional methods is not available. For ethnographic research that
involves photography or videography for recording participants’ daily
lives, there is a risk that other people are shown in the visual materials
collected, and data privacy and informed consent are problems that need
to be resolved. The situation became more complicated when visual data
were shared online for public access, and anonymising relevant parts of
the materials was usually needed. The ethical reviews by the REC thus
require looking at each case in detail to analyse the ethical issues and
assess whether the proposed measures could be justified.
To address these issues, relevant ethical guidelines and procedures
need to be reviewed and updated periodically. The existing literature