The Ethical Roadmap is a set of discursive resources developed within the EPSRC project Enabling Ongoingness to support research teams in navigating ethical issues, concerns and opportunities.

Any moral framework, by its very nature, will be general and broad. Therefore, in order to support the understanding of ethical processes within research across disciplines, this series of practical resources enables group discussion from a range of different angles. The resources are free and open and we hope that different teams will find them useful as they are, but also that some teams will add content to extend the resources in this shared platform. The diversity of research contexts within our global research community will require nuanced content in some resources and we hope that this will become a space to create and share these.

We suggest beginning by using resources that relate to broader ethical concerns (Values, Team Member Roles and Moral Qualities) then moving to activities that involve support and participants (Critical Friends, Consent and Warp and Weft) and to use the Provocations resource cards both as an activity in its own right and also as a facilitator throughout the other activities to help move discussion along and bring some practical context to the other resource topics. Click on each resource below to find out more about each activity.

We would like to give our thanks and acknowledge the support we received from Dementia Positive, Alzheimer’s Society, SheffCare, Cruse Bereavement Care and Dementia Action Alliance in developing these resources – your insights and conversations were invaluable.

values
Values underpin everything you do. But do you share the same understanding of key values, and what do you think are the most important values for working within the context of your project?...
team members
You are aiming to establish a core research team who are all going in the same direction based on a shared vision and values. Dedicate time exploring shared philosophies and values...
moral qualities
Within this section, we have developed a set of moral quality cards, inspired by the ‘Ethical Framework for the Counselling Professions(BACP)’, but developed to fit more a design research context...
critical friends
Setting up a steering group of people from different walks of life, skills and experience to give you honest, constructive feedback will help with possible ethical issues that might arise...
consent
It is essential that we are aware of a person’s capacity to understand what is been asked of them and to find ways to represent and convey information about the study as clearly as possible...
provocations
These provocations start discussions around ethical concerns or issues arising from working with potentially vulnerable group of participants. Think about them as “wild cards” in games...
warp & weft
If we are to move from a position of researching on people, to research with people, we need to develop methods to allow individuals to have a voice in the development of ethics protocols...
glossary