Beyond Belmont: Ethics for Community-Engaged Research

Community-engaged research (CER) methods have become increasingly prevalent in qualitative social science research across a number of fields. The origins and purposes of CER inform an approach to research ethics in which close collaboration to co-produce knowledge with community members is central. Yet the system of ethical principles and procedures that has governed most research involving human participants for more than half a century is rooted in a very different ethical paradigm, one that emerged from revelations of abuses in biomedical research and is designed above all to protect participants from harm. We argue that research orientations (and their underlying ethical principles) are grounded in and constrained by the historical and cultural circumstances that produced them. Advancing an ethics of community engagement and collaboration therefore requires expanding the parameters of ethical consideration and confronting the differences between existing conceptions of research ethics and CER’s ethical imperatives. Questions of how best to do so have spurred active debates and innovations among scholars and practitioners. We seek to contribute to this discussion by a) examining the origins and underpinnings of these distinct ethical paradigms; b) specifying key areas of convergence and divergence between them and the resulting ethical tensions and imperatives that confront CER practitioners; and c) articulating concrete strategies and practices that researchers have pursued to advance an ethics of community-engaged research, drawing in part on insights gained through four CER collaborations with local partners in marginalized low-income communities in central California.