Planning your research and avoiding delays

What to consider before starting to undertake research

It is your responsibility to conduct ethical research, data collection, and data management practices when undertaking any project funded through Victoria Law Foundation’s Grant Program. If you are undertaking research in collaboration with another organisation or other people, you must ensure that they understand their responsibilities and agree to abide by the following standards and principles.

Before starting your research, we strongly recommend that you review the documents under Data collection and ethics standards, in particular, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (2023) (‘National Statement’), which is considered best practice.

We recommend that your Board or management team develop specific guidelines, processes and/or policies before any research project to ensure that your organisation complies with best-practice ethics standards in the collection, use, storage and disposal of data and information. The National Statement can inform this process.

Avoiding unexpected delays, costs and roadblocks

When developing your research proposal, it is important to keep the following resourcing and process considerations in mind.

Partnering with a university/research body

If you are doing research with an academic or team affiliated with a university, you will need to go through their research ethics body. Depending on the ethical risk level of the research, this process can take 3-6 months, and may take longer if significant revisions are required. Factor this into your project timeframes at the beginning to avoid problems down the track.

Undertaking higher risk research

Higher risk research has greater ethical considerations and requirements. Often risk to human participants will be low, or appropriate procedures and practices can be put in place to mitigate risk, but irrespective, an ethical risk assessment must be conducted to determine the ethical risk rating for your research project. If your project has a higher ethical risk, or if you are doing research on or with the specific cohorts listed below, you will not be able to use an internal body for ethics approval and will need to go through an accredited human research ethics committee (HREC).

Cohorts identified in the National Statement as requiring HREC review

• People who are pregnant and the human fetus
• People highly dependent on medical care who may be unable to give consent
• People with a cognitive impairment, an intellectual disability, or a mental illness that may impact on their ability to give consent
• People who may be involved in illegal activities
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples
• People in other countries

Other cohorts for whom specific ethical considerations apply:

• Children and young people
• People in dependent or unequal relationships

Refer to Chapter Four of the National Statement for further details.

If you are interested in doing research on or about these groups without directly engaging with them, see Doing research with lived/living experience: Benefits and challenges.

If your research is higher risk, and you are partnering with an academic institution, you will be required to go through their HREC. While there is no cost for HREC applications for affiliated research, it can be a time-consuming process (up to six months). If you are not partnered with an organisation that has its own HREC, you will need to investigate your eligibility for academic or public HREC services. For-fee HREC services are an expensive option ($4,000-6,000) but tend to be significantly faster.

A full list of HRECs certified and registered with the NHMRC are available online: List of Human Research Ethics Committees registered with NHMRC.

Using administrative data

Using data that has been collected for administrative purposes can be a sound way to reduce the time and cost of research for your organisation and the burden of over-consultation on participants. However, you must ensure that your organisation is complying with all relevant data privacy and protection legislation and ethical protocols if you choose to do this, including having the organisational systems in place to ensure safe and confidential transfer and storage of data.

If administrative data is likely to be an ongoing source for research and evaluation activities, it may be worth reviewing the terms and conditions (including data privacy statements) that clients accept when accessing your service to include a ‘future use’ consent clause that includes use for research and evaluation, and in any reporting and publication. For example, it is common for organisations to use administrative data for research and evaluation to understand and improve their operations, but only in an aggregate and de-identified form.

If you haven’t received prior consent to use administrative data for research (including for any future publication or presentations), it is important to consider how to respect the expectations that clients are likely to have about how their data is used. You would also be expected to acknowledge the data source(s) in any research publications. It is important to consider that using data or information without consent, or beyond privacy expectations, may, in some instances, undermine trust.

Refer to National Statement § 3.1.50- 3.1.53 for guidance regarding the secondary use of administrative data or information, such as for research.

Requesting data from courts, tribunals, or other third parties

Courts and tribunals will often have standard policy approaches to handling requests for access to court data or information for the purposes of research. If you are requesting statistical information that can be readily generated by their case management system, this will likely be a routine process through the local or national registry. If you are requesting access to court data, files or other records, or interviews with Judges, parties or lawyers, the assessment will often require a more detailed review, and specific application processes. It is also common to require permission from the court or tribunal before publishing or releasing any data or information that you have received. Consider that these bodies may seek to recover costs associated with fulfilling the request, and that the requests may also be denied. If you make an FOI request to a Victorian public sector agency and your request is denied, you can make a complaint to the Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner (OVIC) to request a review of the decision.

Refer to the following decision tree to quickly identify the common causes of delay, cost, and other barriers to moving ahead with a research project.

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