Should all community engagement, for research, or service, or technical assistance, require an ethics review?
This is the broadest and deepest of all the ethical questions we face. If you recall the historical origins of ethics review, the model comes out of the horrific scientific abuses of the Nazi regime in Germany, and of United States researchers as late as the 1970s (Reverby, 1998; The Belmont Report, 1979). The goal is to prevent harm being done to research subjects, without their knowledge, in the name of data gathering. Now, it is quite easy to argue that much community engagement does not involve data gathering. Students doing tutoring, or creating membership databases for organizations, or handing out meals at a soup kitchen, are not involved in a research project per se. On the other hand, it is also easy to argue that such activities are, just like medical experiments, designed to have an impact on human subjects. We can even argue that, because service learning projects and technical assistance projects are designed to impact individuals and organizations, they should be designed
