Power and respect in global health research collaboration: Perspectives from research partners in the United States and the Dominican Republic.

Research partnerships between institutions in the Global North and institutions in the Global South have many potential benefits, including sharing of knowledge and resources. However, such partnerships are traditionally exploitative to varying degrees. In order to promote equity in South-North research partnerships, it is necessary to learn from the experiences of researchers collaborating internationally. This study analyzed transcripts from eleven semi-structured qualitative interviews with researchers working at Clínica de Familia La Romana, an institution in the Dominican Republic with decades of experience with research and research partnerships with institutions from the Global North. The findings of this study suggest that respect for resources invested in research, as well as for the researchers and institutions themselves, are vital components to a successful global health research partnership. These findings have implications for individual research partnerships, as well as the policies of journals and institutions providing funding that affect these partnerships.

The ethics of relationality in implementation and evaluation research in global health: reflections from the Dream-A-World program in Kingston, Jamaica.

BACKGROUND: Despite recent developments aimed at creating international guidelines for ethical global health research, critical disconnections remain between how global health research is conducted in the field and the institutional ethics frameworks intended to guide research practice. DISCUSSION: In this paper we attempt to map out the ethical tensions likely to arise in global health fieldwork as researchers negotiate the challenges of balancing ethics committees' rules and bureaucracies with actual fieldwork processes in local contexts. Drawing from our research experiences with an implementation and evaluation project in Jamaica, we argue that ethical research is produced through negotiated spaces and reflexivity practices that are centred on relationships between researchers and study participants and which critically examine issues of positionality and power that emerge at multiple levels. In doing so, we position ethical research practice in global health as a dialectical movement between the spoken and unspoken, or, more generally, between operationalized rules and the embodied relational understanding of persons. Global health research ethics should be premised not upon passive accordance with existing guidelines on ethical conduct, but on tactile modes of knowing that rely upon being engaged with, and responsive to, research participants. Rather than focusing on the operationalization of ethical practice through forms and procedures, it is crucial that researchers recognize that each ethical dilemma encountered during fieldwork is unique and rooted in social contexts, interpersonal relationships, and personal narratives.