In 2011, the Secretariat on Responsible Conduct of Research (a Tri-Council Agency funded by CIHR, SSHRC, & NSERC) launched an educational program to facilitate and enhance the dissemination of TCPS 2, the 2nd edition of the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (2010), which sets the standard for research ethics involving human research in Canada. Three educational modalities were implemented to aid participants in developing or refining their ethical understanding and practice: Regional Workshops, which brought together diverse disciplinary perspectives; the Course on Research Ethics (CORE); an online tutorial which enabled individuals to discover the various aspects and applications of the Policy; and Webinars, which provided participants with the opportunity to explore deeper dimensions of research ethics.
This poster reports on the processes and findings of a program evaluation conducted of the TCPS 2 educational program. A formative, mixed-method program evaluation employing surveys following a pre-post design, interviews, and focus groups was conducted with a national sample of research ethics stakeholders across Canada. Specifically, novice users (primarily graduate students and early-career researchers) benefitted most from CORE, through which they increased their familiarity with fundamental research ethics principles and applications, such as ethics review. Intermediate-level users (such as practicing researchers and faculty members) benefitted greatly from the Regional Workshops, in which they worked collaboratively through difficult or complex research ethics cases and further increased their familiarity by referring to the Policy. Advanced users benefitted most from the Regional Workshops, where they engaged in deep explorations of a case, and the Webinar, which provided a focused exploration of a specific research ethics subject-area. Implications arising from this study will be discussed.