Page 56 - Academic and Research Book_WEB

Consent has four essential components: disclosure; comprehension; competence, and voluntariness
(Sim, 2010 as cited in Sim and Waterfield, op. cit.).

• Disclosure is the extent and adequacy of information given;
• Comprehension to how well the information is understood;
• Competence refers to the participant/s readiness to give consent; and
• Voluntariness to the degree of freedom that the participant has in giving consent.

• Consent serves to formalize and legitimize the researcher’s ethical concerns.
Free and informed consent is at the heart of ethical research. It is also a process rather than an
endpoint. Obtaining informed consent implies that the study population fully understands the
study to be undertaken. This means that the objectives and purpose of research, the research design,
methods, tools, and how the study results will be disseminated should be conveyed to the study
population. The study population also needs to understand the methods being used to conduct the
research and obtain the data. If audio- and video-graphing are used, then they need to be especially
mentioned. The increasing use of information technologies in research makes the process of informed
consent much more complex Further, and often contentiously, the study population has to be given
the liberty to withdraw from the study at any point during the research.
Divulging all the above information may generate several problems, chiefly the following three:

1. Researchers often claim that the intricacies of social design and methods etc. may not be
understood by the study population no matter how lucidly they are presented. This gives rise to
the second dilemma,
2. If the study information is partially or incorrectly understood it can generate suspicion. A
section of social researchers claim that consent is obtained more easily without divulging all the
information about the research study.

3. The right to withdraw causes problems in the data being collected. This, researchers claim, leads
to a conflict between the standards of research ethics and the quality standards of data gathering.
(Colnerud, 2013).

Overall, however, with greater appreciation of the need for sharing information with the study
population and of adhering to the principles of ethics, researchers have found ways and means of
ensuring adherence to research ethics.

Informed consent covers a range of procedures that must be implemented before a research study
begins. Consent must be freely given and may be withdrawn at any time [See Box 1]. As mentioned
above, the study participants must fully understand the conditions under which they may withdraw
from the study. The researcher must also explain how any injury, if it occurs during the research, will
be resolved and define the nature of such possible injuries. While injury is easily understood in the
biomedical context, it is more wide-ranging in social research. For instance, a study of the sexual
behaviour of adolescent women may result in social repercussions on young women, even when there
has been strict norms or privacy maintained. The very act of conducting such research may lead to an
authoritarian response in a community.
The researcher has the responsibility to make the community elders and unofficial gatekeepers in a
patriarchal society understand the objectives of the research. It is also necessary to state the objectives
in a manner that does not arouse negative responses.

Obtaining informed consent cannot be a perfunctory action. It cannot be rushed, and the researcher
needs to allocate time for this in the research plan. While informed consent is common enough in

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