Duration of project

Duration of the project: February 2025 – March 2026.

CHANSE projects and partners leading and/or collaborating on the initiative

• Recovira:  Joshua Edelman
• DigitIslam: Avi Astor, Katarzyna Górak-Sosnowska
• DiDe: Johanna Sumiala

Initiative summary

Current research ethics protocols across Europe struggle to deal with human participants, especially with respect to digital methods. Although protecting human participants is of the utmost importance, poorly designed or implemented ethics protocols may erode trust and generate needless obstacles to the research process. Moreover,

the imbalances in ethical protocols across Europe impede necessary comparative research and frustrate both researchers and research subjects. This not only generates inefficiencies in the use of academic resources; it leads to a lack of appropriately comparative research that can address important issues of contemporary digital societies.

We will use our expertise and experience to develop a common ethical framework for research involving human participants, digital research, and/or sensitive issues that can be implemented by universities, funding bodies, and the like. We will develop this framework through a survey and focus groups of research subjects from our CHANSE projects. We will finalise it at the final CHANSE conference with the KEF’s team’s assistance, and test it out through two workshops and a final set of focus groups.

Audiences

• Members of the public who volunteer to be research subjects (via surveys, interviews, etc)
• Research policy-makers, including governments and foundations, across Europe
• Academic colleagues who lead or participate in an ethics process

If you are interested in engaging with the research, or if you have suggestions for improving ethics protocols around Europe, we’d love to hear from you. Please email the team at [email protected].