This blog is by Michael Terwey, Director of Public Engagement & Research, National Trust for Scotland. Michael is also a board member of the UK Museums Association and chair of its Ethics Committee.
Perspectives on Research is a series of blog posts commissioned as part of the Early Career Research Fellowships in Cultural and Heritage Institutions programme, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and coordinated by the V&A.

At the early stages of developing a new collaborative research project it’s important to understand how you will design and manage the work ethically. Any research that involves human participants, such as museum visitors, will have elements of risk to manage, and sometimes work with museum collections can also have inherent risks depending on their nature and provenance.
There are two parts to understanding how to manage ethics in collaborative research – navigating the required organisational mechanisms designed to support ethics, and understanding the principles that underpin professional and research ethics and how they apply to your project. Your funder may also have ethical guidance to consider, and for information on UKRIs ethical principles, please use this link – ‘Good Research Resource Hub’
A collaborative research project will be subject to the requirements of each research organisation’s ethics procedures. Institutions have different approaches but tend to involve reviewing a standardised application form which is assessed for any ethical risks associated with the methodology. In most cases ethical approval is mandatory before a research project can proceed.
Your collaborative partner organisation will work differently. Some may have their own function for assessing ethics; National Museums Liverpool, for example, have an internal Ethics Group who “meet regularly to review specific ethical cases or concerns.” Other institutions may consider ethics as part of broader risk-management and governance processes. In my own organisation (National Trust for Scotland) there is a formal Project Management Framework, which requires a completed risk assessment, and a scheme of delegation where the level of authority required for the approval of a new activity depends on its financial value. Some research projects may be low budget but still have significant ethical risks associated with, for example, working with audiences or with sensitive historical subjects. As there is so much variation in the ways that different organisations manage ethics, risk, and approvals, it is important that you discuss this with your host organisation at the earliest stage.
Your partner organisation, and the people working in it, may also have their own systems and codes of ethics relating to their professions. Members of the Museums Association in the UK sign up to a Code of Ethics, and a similar framework is in place for members of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). Different disciplines may have their own specific ethics guidance such as Museum Ethnography or Archaeology. The governance structure of the organisation may play a role too, and charities may subscribe to the Charity Ethical Principles set out by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), while public sector bodies are bound by the Nolan Principles for standards in public life.
While these mechanisms and frameworks may seem convoluted and bureaucratic, it is important to remember that Ethics is at a very basic level simply about the application of principles to practice. While Research Ethics in a university context is distinct from Professional Ethics as applied in a partner organisation, there is very likely to be a high degree of alignment between the two. For example, minimising the risk of harm to human participants, and ensuring openness and transparency, will be core principles that extend across different codes, frameworks, and processes. A research project that is designed around sound and widely accepted ethical principles will be most likely to pass all the required approvals and produce valuable new research ethically.
Perspectives on Research aims to shine a light on different aspects of research in cultural and heritage organisations, with contributions invited from a range of practitioners with experience of working in or with the sector. Through this series, we aim to develop a set of resources that may be helpful to researchers working in or thinking about working in cultural and heritage organisations beyond the programme itself.