Christine Grant

Transnational education has grown rapidly in recent years, but the policies and procedures embedded within Western universities may not adequately reflect the environment in which students study and conduct research.
This thesis explores the beliefs and attitudes towards research ethics among graduate students in the two south-central African countries of Zambia and Malawi. The participants were ten mid-career professionals studying graduate business programs delivered in-country in partnership with a British university; as part of their programme they were required to undertake their own primary research project.
By undertaking a qualitative study of students in the region, it uncovers a complex multi-layered ethical system, which includes traditional sources, oral traditions, village uncles, and indigenous religious sources, alongside Western-centric missionary religions, and the formal processes such as those advocated by their professions and University ethics processes. Each of these informs the students’ approaches, often resulting in traditional cultural attitudes towards ethics sitting uneasily alongside contemporary ethical views. This can make the formal research ethics processes used by Western universities operating in the region appear overly strict and inflexible to students leading to tensions between what they are required to do by the university and what they believe is right.
The growth of transnational education necessitates the investigation of approaches that make research ethics processes more flexible without removing the ethics approval processes, so this thesis advocates a culturally adapted research ethics protocol (CAREP) as a model, bringing regional attitudes to ethics and culture into the research ethics processes through a continuing dialogic approach. CAREP recognises the impact of cultural factors on an under researched area of education and provides a contribution to the growing debate on ethics in general and indigenous ethics in particular. It also offers a new perspective on the decolonisation of universities by recognising the importance of processes as well as the curriculum.
Adopting a phenomenographic approach, the study uses semi-structured, in-depth qualitative interviews to consider the students’ views of ethics and the influences that contribute to their ethical perspective. Their beliefs and attitudes are contrasted with the rigid ethical compliance required in Western universities. Through rich data, including vivid storytelling, the participants indicated numerous factors that contributed to their beliefs and attitudes towards research ethics which are categorised into close social groups, traditional historical ethics reinforced through storytelling, their religion, their urban versus rural location, and their beliefs about professionalism.