Helosvuori, Elina http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7511-9733
Funding for this research was provided by:
Helsingin Yliopisto
Article History
First Online: 23 March 2018
Ethical Approval
: Ethical approvals have not been sought for the PhD study from which the original empirical data come from. None of the funders (the Kone Foundation and the Doctoral Programme in Gender, Culture and Society, University of Helsinki) required ethical approvals for the study. The subject matter of, especially, the interviews and the peer-support groups touches issues of health and personal experience. All the participants of the study were informed of the purposes of the research and how the data will be used. All the interviewees gave a written informed consent. All the other participants gave an oral informed consent. According to the instructions of the University of Helsinki and the Finnish Advisory Board on Research Integrity, an ethics approval should be sought only in the following cases: (1) research is physically invasive; (2) a consent is not asked; (3) research is conducted among children or people aged under 15 years; (4) research participants are subjected to intense stimulus (for example, violence or pornography); (5) there is a risk of long-term mental harm (trauma, depression, insomnia) or; (6) the research can cause danger to participants’ safety.As my research setting does not meet any of these criteria for the need of an ethics approval, the usual, careful process of providing enough information of the research and its purposes as well as careful handling of data and data anonymisation were deemed sufficient.