Woodhill Park Retreat

Opinion Pieces

Welcome to a series of occassional commentaries concerning matters about which we have opinions.  We invite your input into any of the dialogues we have sparked. 

This is the first of a three parts on the vexed matter of ethics and the impact of ethics committees.  This first part proposes that a latent consequence of the deliberations of ethics committees is that they change the design and behaviour of researchers in a range of ways.  I have labelled this as "ethical determinism" and propose that there are at least five variants to this phenomenon.

The second part will examine the need to develop 'win-win' situations between ethics committees and researchers.  Some possible common-sense strategies will also be proposed.

The third and final installment will consider some cases where ethical considerations have gone awry and will briefly outline the consequences of such outcomes.  

I need at the outset to make the point that as this is an opinion piece, it comprises my ruminations about an issue.  This means that I've not yet looked at the literature about this matter and much of what I have to say here may, in fact, already have been considered by other writers.  If anyone wants to drop me a line about any of the points I've made, please do... so here we go with part one of three.  

Some thoughts on supervision

Often the thesis supervision process is flawed.  This brief paper considers the importance of good supervision and offers the Woodhill Park Research Retreat as an alternative venue when supervision challenges arise.  Ideally, candidates and their supervisor/s should work together with staff at the Woodhill Park Research Retreat. 

Hint: Pay particular attention to the footnote because it provides a hotlink to a key-note presentation that was given by the author at a conference for Ph.D. candidates that was held University of Auckland (or if you like, you can click here to access that keynote address).