Pakeha "paralysis": cultural safety for those researching the general population of aotearoa.

• Author: Tolich, Martin

Abstract

The emergence and dominance of the Maori-centred research paradigm is leaving Pakeha researchers out in the cold. "Pakeha paralysis" draws on my experiences as author, teacher and university ethics committee member to account for the reasons why so many Pakeha postgraduate students are caught in a state of paralysis, deliberately excluding Maori from their general population research samples. While supposedly addressing cultural concerns, through avoiding cultures not their own, these Pakeha researchers fail to fulfil Treaty of Waitangi responsibilities. This paper offers explanations of why this paralysis developed, and how it has been codified into health and tertiary ethics guidelines and in university teaching. The paper ends by offering solutions to work through this cultural web by honouring the Treaty of Waitangi while promoting cultural safety for Pakeha researching New Zealand society.

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TALES FROM THE FIELD (2)

The ethnographer Van Maanen (1988) suggests retelling tales from the field as a means of stating a research problem while making for a dramatic beginning. All three tales at the start of this paper focus on postgraduate student research in New Zealand universities. Starting in this way allows for later generalisation to include all research involving Pakeha researchers in New Zealand. For the moment the research problem is centred on postgraduate students attempting to research the New Zealand general population. The subject matter stems from my role as a deputy chair of a university ethics committee. This role has me field many telephone calls from students and researchers seeking advice on how to best navigate an ethics committee application.

Recently a Pakeha postgraduate student called me to query the cultural concerns section of an ethics application for a university's ethics committee. I asked the student to outline her research and she proudly said her doctorate examined both clients' and workers' experiences of work culture in three banks: the ASB, the BNZ and the new Kiwibank. She went on to say that she believed that there were no cultural issues given that she did not plan to specifically target Maori.

What struck me most about this query was how she seemingly remained oblivious to the fact that her focus compared the cultures of clients and workers across three banks. The student said she planned to write "not applicable" in the cultural concerns section of the ethics committee application. She asked me if I thought an ethics committee would have a problem with that. It would seem that given that she planned not to include Maori in the study, she thought her study crossed no cultural boundaries. The irony, of course, was that the doctorate substantively focused on cultural boundaries. In her thinking, "culture" meant "Maori". This paper explores the source of this assumption and how it has been codified in ethical practice in New Zealand by teachers, authors and institutional ethics committees.

A second tale stems from my chairing a "mock ethics" committee for postgraduate students at a distant university. During the day, 12 postgraduate students orally presented their written research proposals, outlining their projects' ethical considerations. As I listened to these applications I was struck by the reluctance of these Pakeha students to research Maori: all researchers sought only Pakeha informants, "snowballed" among their friends and workmates. To be more explicit, the Pakeha postgraduate students had actively excluded Maori. When asked for a personal explanation for this exclusion, the students collectively reported they had been taught by their teachers to exclude Maori. As Pakeha they had learned that they had no place researching Maori. At no time had they been taught how to consider cross-cultural research.

What are the ethical considerations of this exclusion of Maori by these 12 students? Firstly, their proposals were ethical in all other respects: they did not contradict core ethical principles of informed consent, voluntary participation, deceit or conflict of interest. On the contrary the proposals on these measures were exemplary. The ethical principle that they violated was harm. (3)

Harm as an ethical principle has many guises. Harm can occur to the subject, the researcher or the institution. In Herbert Green's "Unfortunate Experiment", eight women died (Coney 1989). Harm may also occur to the unsuspecting researcher. Interviewing a prisoner alone can bring harm. Equally what an informant says about a topic (for example, grief), may harm the researcher. A third type of harm can arise for an institution. Again, to cite the "unfortunate experiment", Auckland University and National Women's Hospital were harmed in that they were no longer trusted to guarantee good practice (Coney 1989). In the wake of the Cartwright Commission, institutional ethics committees in New Zealand operate as risk managers, both for themselves and for the researchers who investigate under their masthead (Casey 2001:131). Thus, ethics committees have come to manage the risk involved in cultural sensitivity to such an extent that universities and health ethics committees may unwittingly harm the subjects they seek to protect. The irony of these tales from the field is that they document how protecting Maori from harm may in fact be harmful in terms of Treaty responsibilities.

The third tale from the field underlines this irony. The tale involves a postgraduate student's thesis. It was this tale that prompted me to place my head above the parapet and to expose these ethical ironies. The student's supervisor relayed the following to me. He said his student wanted to generate a research sample, blind, via both an advertisement in a local newspaper and pinned on supermarket community notice boards. I told the supervisor I saw no issue with this practice. However, in addition, the supervisor said the student held a firm belief that because he was Pakeha, the university's ethics committee would require him to exclude all Maori from his research sample. The supervisor had not questioned the student's reasoning and simply sought my advice on how to achieve this end.

There are some obvious differences between this research design and the small-scale snowballed research projects presented in the mock orals scenario outlined above. In any newspaper/supermarket advertisement the researcher does not know who will read the advertisement and who will respond. The sample size depends on how interesting the potential informants think the research sounds. This response could easily be 100 potential informants or more, none of whom the researcher knows in advance. This student's thesis thus places ethics beyond the comfort zone of friends and workmates, potentially placing the institution at risk.

How should the student frame the advertisement? "Informants wanted for master's thesis research project"? This could attract possible subjects, but is this ethical in this case? If this research matches the conditions of the mock oral group above where Maori are excluded, then "Informants wanted for master's thesis research project" is misleading. A more honest statement would be "Pakeha informants wanted for master's thesis research project". An even more candid announcement would be "Maori need not apply". The latter places the institution at risk.

The fact that this explicit advertisement excluding Maori has not developed in the public arena should not be reason for complacency. These explicit advertisements can and are easily subverted by a sleight of hand on any researcher's part. The advertisement may read "Informants wanted for master's thesis research project" which prospective informants may read and respond to. The sleight-of-hand exclusion occurs within a preliminary interview, where routine demographic details are collected. When Maori self-identify themselves, some postgraduate students feel compelled to follow what they have been taught and politely exclude Maori from their sample. This procedure is simple and, according to this student's supervisor, what the ethics committee supposedly wants.

What is the harm within this advertisement or sleight of hand? And who is harmed? Is it the subject, the researcher or the institution? This paper suggests this problem is an institutional dilemma. For some perverse reason university lecturers and institutional ethics committees (such as the Health Research Council, see below) are promoting culturally sensitive research that violates the spirit of the Treaty of Waitangi. On the one hand these institutions seem to be mandating that Pakeha...