JPPMI | ETHICAL COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
Protecting the rights, dignity, safety, confidentiality, and autonomy of individuals and communities involved in scholarly community engagement.
Jurnal Pengabdian dan Pengembangan Masyarakat Indonesia (JPPMI) is committed to protecting the dignity, autonomy, safety, privacy, and welfare of individuals and communities participating in community engagement, community empowerment, program evaluation, and related scholarly activities.
Authors are responsible for complying with applicable ethical, institutional, professional, and legal requirements. These responsibilities include obtaining appropriate permissions, determining whether formal ethics review is required, ensuring voluntary participation, protecting personal information, and accurately reporting ethical safeguards.
Ethical requirements must be proportionate to the activities undertaken, the information collected, the participants involved, and the reasonably foreseeable risks.
Not every community engagement activity constitutes research involving human participants. Routine education, mentoring, technical assistance, public information sessions, and other minimal-risk community services may not require formal research ethics committee approval, depending on applicable institutional and national requirements.
Nevertheless, describing an activity as community service does not automatically exempt it from ethical review. An authorized institutional determination may be necessary when activities involve systematic data collection, research-oriented evaluation, clinical procedures, sensitive personal information, or vulnerable participants.
| Activity | Examples | Ethical Considerations |
|---|---|---|
| Routine Community Service | General education, mentoring, and non-sensitive training. | Community permission, voluntary involvement, privacy protection, and consent for identifiable publication; formal review when required. |
| Program Evaluation | Pre-tests, post-tests, interviews, questionnaires, and behavioral evaluation. | Assessment of research classification, consent, privacy risks, and ethics approval or exemption where required. |
| Health-Related Activities | Health screening, nutrition interventions, clinical measurements, and collection of health information. | Risk assessment, appropriately documented consent, qualified supervision, and prospective ethics review when required. |
| Vulnerable Participants | Children, individuals with impaired consent capacity, or people subject to dependency or coercion risks. | Additional safeguards, consent or assent as applicable, and appropriate institutional oversight. |
Institutional Determination: When requirements are unclear, authors should consult an authorized ethics committee or institutional authority before undertaking the activity. Authors must not independently claim exemption when applicable rules require an official determination.
Where formal ethics approval is required, it must normally be obtained before participant recruitment, intervention, or data collection begins.
Manuscripts reporting approved activities must identify the relevant ethics committee or institution, approval reference number, and date.
When an authorized institution grants an exemption or determines that formal review is unnecessary, authors should describe the determination and provide the relevant institutional reference when available.
Ethics committee approval does not remove the authors' responsibility to obtain appropriate consent, safeguard participants, and accurately report the activities undertaken.
Authors should use a statement that accurately describes the ethical oversight applicable to their activities.
"This program and its evaluation received approval from [ethics committee or institution], approval number [number], dated [date]."
"The responsible institutional body determined that this activity was exempt from formal ethics committee review because [reason]. The determination was issued by [institution], reference [number], dated [date]."
"Formal research ethics committee review was not required under the applicable institutional requirements because this activity was a routine, minimal-risk community service program. Participant consent, privacy protection, and community permission were managed as appropriate."
Examples must be adapted to the actual circumstances. Authors must not fabricate approvals, exemptions, dates, or institutional determinations.
Informed consent is a continuing communication process through which individuals make voluntary decisions about their participation.
Participants should receive understandable and culturally appropriate information about:
Written consent is generally preferred for sensitive, health-related, or identifiable information. Oral consent may be acceptable in appropriate minimal-risk circumstances if consistent with institutional or ethics requirements and adequately documented.
Participation must not be secured through coercion, misleading promises, or undue influence.
Consent to participate in a community program does not automatically provide permission to publish personally identifiable information.
| Consent Type | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Participation Consent | Agreement to participate in an activity, interview, survey, assessment, or intervention. |
| Publication Consent | Agreement to publish identifiable photographs, recordings, quotations, personal histories, or other identifiable information. |
Publication consent must be obtained when an individual can reasonably be identified directly or through contextual details. Authors should inform participants that information made publicly available may be difficult or impossible to withdraw from all subsequent copies or repositories.
Photographic and audiovisual documentation is common in community engagement manuscripts. Authors must ensure that published documentation represents actual activities and respects participant rights.
Additional safeguards are necessary when participants may experience increased risks because of age, impaired decision-making capacity, disability, health conditions, institutional dependency, economic vulnerability, or unequal power relationships.
Authors should obtain appropriate permission from community organizations, schools, healthcare facilities, local authorities, or other responsible institutions before implementing activities on their premises or using institutional resources.
Community and institutional permissions support legitimate program implementation, but do not replace individual consent or formal ethics review when those requirements apply.
Authors should accurately describe the involvement of community partners, their responsibilities, and any restrictions governing use of community information or documentation.
Personal information should be collected only when necessary for legitimate program objectives or evaluation. Authors must consider privacy protection throughout collection, processing, analysis, storage, sharing, and publication.
Public availability of information on social media does not automatically remove privacy and ethical obligations. Names, usernames, screenshots, messages, profile images, location details, and other identifiable material must be handled according to consent, applicable law, platform requirements, and foreseeable risks.
Data sharing must be consistent with informed consent, ethics decisions, institutional requirements, community agreements, and applicable privacy and data protection rules.
De-identification should be assessed in context and must not be assumed to eliminate all re-identification risks.
When data cannot be shared safely or lawfully, the manuscript's Data Availability Statement should explain the relevant restrictions without exposing protected information.
The following statements may be adapted to reflect the actual procedures used in the reported program.
"Written informed consent was obtained from all participants before their participation in the program and its evaluation."
"Consent was obtained from the participants' parents or legal guardians, and age-appropriate assent was obtained from the participating children."
"Consent for publication was obtained from identifiable individuals appearing in the photographs. For minors, permission was obtained from a parent or legal guardian."
"Participant data were de-identified before analysis and reporting. Identifiable information is not publicly available due to applicable privacy and confidentiality restrictions."
Statements are illustrative. Authors must not claim that consent, ethics approval, or privacy safeguards were obtained or implemented if they were not.
Data originally gathered for routine community-service activities may subsequently be considered for research-oriented analysis or scholarly publication.
When the original consent or institutional authorization did not address the intended secondary use, authors should consult an authorized institutional body to determine whether ethics review, exemption, additional consent, or restrictions apply.
A retrospective ethics determination must not be described as if it were prospective approval obtained before the original activity.
JPPMI editors may request relevant documentation when questions arise regarding ethical oversight, participant consent, community authorization, data handling, or the accuracy of ethical declarations.
Requested documentation may include ethics approval letters, exemption determinations, consent documentation, institutional permissions, or relevant data protection procedures.
Sensitive documentation must be managed confidentially. Editors should avoid requesting unnecessary identifiable records and should use secure submission arrangements appropriate to the circumstances.
Where required ethical oversight or consent is absent, author declarations are inaccurate, or participant protection is inadequate, the journal may request clarification, decline a submission, or take appropriate post-publication action in accordance with its publication integrity procedures.
The enhanced ethics documentation requirements under this policy apply prospectively to manuscripts submitted to JPPMI on or after 1 September 2026.
Articles submitted or published before that date are not automatically considered non-compliant solely because they do not include documentation required under the updated policy. Nevertheless, credible concerns regarding participant harm, lack of consent, serious privacy violations, or other ethical issues may be investigated regardless of publication date.
Authors remain responsible for complying with applicable institutional, professional, and legal ethical requirements. Acceptance by JPPMI does not replace ethical oversight obligations or diminish the duty to protect individuals and communities.
