Bridging ethics and culture: a co-created, culturally sensitive informed consent framework for research in Bimoba and Mamprusi communities in Ghana
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Informed consent (IC) is a cornerstone of ethical research, yet standard models grounded in Western, individual-focused principles often require contextual adaptation in collectivist settings. This study co-created a culturally responsive IC framework for research with the Bimoba and Mamprusi ethnic groups in Ghana, operationalizing respect for autonomy in ways that reflect local values and decision-making norms. We employed a qualitative, cross-sectional design involving interviews and focus group discussions with community leaders, members, and stakeholders from academia, NGOs, and ethics committees. Thematic analysis identified culturally endorsed recruitment practices, resulting in a four-step framework: community entry, independent mediation at households, invitation of eligible participants, and a culturally embedded, multi-step consent process. The framework was pilot-tested in four communities and developed through a collaborative, multistakeholder process. While grounded in IC principles, the framework reflects broader community engagement values, reinforcing relational autonomy, trust, and cultural legitimacy. Rather than rejecting standard models, it offers a context-sensitive adaptation that enables ethical and legitimate recruitment. This study informs research ethics in the Global South and offers practical guidance for researchers, ethics committees, and institutions in similar contexts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.050 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it