Conference Agenda

Research syntheses are a meanwhile important method to gather evidence on urgent questions and to support decision-making in policy and practice worldwide (Newman & Gough, 2020, p. 4). By aggregating or configurating what has been known so far, they help not only researchers in education science but also practicioners to find concise answers to a problem or to learn about promising interventions based on clearly calculated effect sizes or the careful interpretation of qualitative research results. Research syntheses have their place in today’s research landscape in education science as a scientific and trustworthy method for synthesising research results to foster evidence-based decision-making on a specific research question. Research syntheses or systematic reviews as a scientific method of their own have gained attention during the last decades (Gough et al., 2017) and are an essential part of knowledge building. Grant and Booth (2009) identified 14 types of reviews differing in scope and method, including the systematic review that combines amongst others the stages of a systematic literature search, an appraisal of the potentially relevant studies and the synthesis of the findings (Grant & Booth, 2009, p. 102). The classification of review types can be described as multidimensional (Booth et al., 2012, p. 20) and recently, Sutton et al. (2019) came up with 48 review types classified into seven groups based on common features and goals.

Irrespective of nomenclature, all research syntheses include a process, where researchers have to decide which literature they assess as basis for their syntheses or results (Boland et al., 2017, p. 25). Within the review’s context, researchers face challenges in making decisions on the literature search process, the inclusion and exclusion criteria applied to the literature retrieved and the concrete process of the synthesis to get their evidence-based results. However, how and why researchers decide on the relevance of research papers and how the steps during a systematic review process influence one another, is not fully understood. There is consent about the fact that a careful selection of relevant literature is one of the most important decisions that influence the synthesis and the concluding findings of a review (Lefebvre et al., 2021). How reviewers in educational research are influenced by their information behaviour and comprehension of relevance elucidates the process of understanding the insights behind decisions and the motivation for including relevant studies.

Relevance assessment processes are the higher-level principle when conducting research syntheses. Yet, the notion of relevance of information resources is complex and can be best described as a relation to an object or a context being expressed in a degree of appropriateness (Saracevic, 2017) or usefulness. Another way to understand the concept of relevance is introduced by Mizzaro (1997) who distinguishes four dimensions (research query or user problem, information resources, components like context, topic or task, and time). Bringing these four dimensions together, relevance can be compared to a “point in a four-dimensional space” (Mizzaro, 1997, p. 812). In systematic review processes, researchers have to deal with degrees of relevance in view of the literature they assess. This is expressed by determining criteria that can be attributed to the foresaid dimensions. In many cases criteria can be categorised as formal relating to searching and filtering literature or as content-applied regarding the research question to be answered. But there are additional factors (e.g. subjective or environmental) that influence the reviewers’ decisions on including studies. This talk introduces a study that investigated researchers’ processes of relevance rating in research syntheses in education science. It will contribute to a better understanding of relevance decisions by researchers and their challenges when conducting syntheses.

In recent decades, the landscape of social sciences research has undergone significant transformation, driven primarily by two key trends. Firstly, the internationalisation of higher education has spurred institutions and researchers to cultivate global collaborations and engage in comparative research across diverse national contexts (Kwiek, 2021; Williamson et al., 2019). Secondly, there has been a burgeoning research focus on comprehending the dynamics of digital spaces, with a particular emphasis on the broader impact of social media (Ball & Traxler, 2023; Black et al., 2022; Literat & Kligler-Vilenchik, 2018). These interconnected trends consistently shape various facets of social sciences research today, and into the future, including its research agenda, funding allocation, research evaluation processes, and institutional frameworks for research activities, including institutional review boards (IRB) and ethics clearance processes and procedures (Hillman, 2023; Peled-Raz et al., 2021).

Ethical approval is a crucial step in the research planning process serving both as a risk management tool (McAreavey & Muir, 2011) and, in some cases, as a significant potential obstacle in project implementation (Head, 2020; Merrill & Whitsel, 2017; Taylor et al., 2020). Research has documented that the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process, which involves obtaining ethical approval for projects, is shaped not only by the study’s subject matter, but also by context sensitive research settings, and data management and protection issues (Graffigna et al., 2010; Whiteman, 2018). Additionally, ethical considerations extend to the handling of sensitive topics (Dawson et al., 2017; Vaughan, 2023; Winter & Gundur, 2024) and potential impact on young individuals (van Woudenberg et al., 2023). All these issues form an intricacy of contemporary social science research, which flexible nature often contradicts the static form of research approval (Brown, 2023).

This study serves as a reflective exploration into the process of obtaining ethical approval through institutional IRBs for an international project funded by the European Research Council (ERC). The project itself focuses on the analysis of youth activism, employing retrospective analysis of social media accounts of young activists and prospective inquiry using a photovoice methodology with selected sample of those young activists. Additionally, secondary school aged students are invited in freely structured group discussions on global citizenship issues. The project includes data collection across six countries: Australia, Germany, Italy, Poland, the UK, and the US.

As shown above, existing scholarship has highlighted potential challenges in research involving minors, privacy concerns related to social media, and discussions on sensitive issues. This project, having encountered these challenges on multiple levels, further invites the discussion around ethical approval processes. To do this, our paper encompasses perspectives from both junior and senior scholars participating in the project, addresses the current state of affairs in IRB approvals, and discusses the practice of implementing a large-scale cross country comparative project. Our study is framed by three key research questions:

1. To what extent do higher education institutions balance country-specific legal policies and the requirements of cross-cultural research projects?;
2. What are the perspectives of junior and senior scholars regarding the goals and processes involved in obtaining ethical approvals?; and
3. What are the primary concerns of ethical committees in the multinational projects that involve minors, sensitive issues, and the collection of data from social media?