Navigating ethical approval challenges: A case of cross-national multi-method social science project

The last few decades have significantly changed international research collaborations in the social sciences. Projects now span multiple countries, employ diverse methodologies, and involve various actors, producing varied data for dissemination across scholarship, practice, and policy domains. Such complexity poses not only research challenges but also considerable legislative concerns, particularly regarding privacy protection and the evolving landscape of data gathering and usage. Navigating the increasingly flexible and intricate nature of contemporary research, alongside constantly changing legislation, has become a new hurdle for delivering robust comparative projects. Employing a case study approach, we examine the ethical approval process experienced by the project team members, including postdoctoral and doctoral students, project advisory board members, and the PI. The project under investigation encompassed several potential challenges: a range of qualitative research methods, sensitive topics, multi-site data collection, participants under 18, and the use of social media data. We traced this process across multiple international sites, demonstrating how these challenges collectively contributed to the overall complexity of ethical and data governance issues. Our findings illustrate the difficulties presented by ethical approval processes, the changes these processes imposed on the study design, and inconsistencies within the ethical clearance process across funding entities, countries, and institutions. We underscore three disjunctures inherent in ethical approval processes. By mapping the ethical route across multiple sites, we offer insights for researchers planning international projects, as well as for Research Ethics Committees, institutions, and other stakeholders within higher education seeking to support research endeavours.