Ethical Dilemmas in Cross-national Qualitative Research: A Reflection on Personal Experiences of Ethics from a Doctoral Research Project

Gaining ethical approval for qualitative health research and implementing all the planned research processes in a proposed study are not straightforward endeavours. The situation becomes more complex when qualitative research is conducted in a cross-national healthcare and academic context. Also, it is even exhausting when the study is student-based, as student researchers may be considered novices and inexperienced researchers, especially for field-based research. Our aim in this reflective paper is to present, reflect, and discuss the experiences of a doctoral researcher in dealing with two independent institutional review boards in Canada and Ghana during an interdisciplinary Ph.D. project and the ethical dilemmas encountered while collecting data in Ghana. Based on the researcher’s experiences, it became apparent that consent and its documentation can have cultural implications in different settings; hence, institutional review boards must exercise reflexivity in their protocol review practice. Also, sharing research data with participants and institutional leaders while maintaining participant confidentiality and privacy in institutional ethnographic research requires sensitivity to bi-lateral ethical values. With the experiences shared in this paper, we advocate for a dialogic ethical review process in qualitative research where researchers and research ethics boards engage in ongoing dialogue rather than the usual prescriptive format research ethics reviews often assume.