Finding Your Ethical Research Self

A Guidebook for Novice Qualitative Researchers

Martin Tolich, Emma Tumilty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780429614897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Finding Your Ethical Research Self introduces novice researchers to the need for ethical reflection in practice and gives them the confidence to use their knowledge and skill when, later as researchers, they are confronted by big ethical moments in the field.

The 12 chapters build on each other, but not in a linear way. Core ethical concepts like consent and confidentiality once established in the early chapters are later challenged. The new focus becomes how to address qualitative research ethics when confidentiality and consent take on a limited form. This approach helps students understand that the application of concepts always requires thoughtful adaptation in different contexts and the book provides guidance on how to do this. Classroom/workbook exercises develop alternative solutions to create process consent, internal confidentiality, and engage reference groups, as examples. The first eight chapters allow students to develop their ethical research self before thinking through how they might address formal ethics review. Formal ethics review is deliberately not introduced until Chapter 9. Chapter 10 offers practical help to elements of review, before Chapter 11 emphasises the key message by providing examples of researchers' dilemmas in the field using vignettes and discussion. By providing these examples, students become aware that these can arise, explore how they might arise, and recognise how they might deal with them in the moment when they are unavoidable.

With numerous examples of ethical dilemmas and issues and questions and exercises to encourage self-reflection, this reflexive, learn-by-doing model of research ethics will be highly useful to the novice researcher, undergraduate, and postgraduate research student.

Chapter 1

The one-minute ethicist

Why write the text, the cartoons [Figures 1 and 2] say it all.

Professor Emeritus

Figure 1 documents the origin of this book. It illustrates a real event when one of the authors was teaching a postgraduate class in qualitative research ethics at the University of Otago in 2016. The class began on day one with a provocation to see if the five postgraduate students could identify ethical conundrums that may not sit well with them and to see if they could come up with some solutions to this conundrum. As the cartoon shows, they did. This book developed from that single moment. Tolich assigned no reading for the first class. His goal was to make the students central to their own learning (Harland & Wald, 2018; Kilburn et al., 2014; Lewthwaite & Nind, 2016). The five students were novices to research ethics (Tolich et al., 2017) and self-confessed no knowledge of qualitative research ethics. They said:

• I knew pretty much nothing. I knew a little about ethics committees, but nothing about the actual lived ethics experience.
• Prior to class, the only understanding of [research] ethics I had was a standard textbook definition: conducting research ethically means to do research in a safe and secure manner where participants’ wellbeing and interests are safeguarded during the pursuit of knowledge.
• My prior knowledge of qualitative ethics was limited to writing a paragraph for “ethical consideration” for undergrad courses.
• I began this class with what I felt was a reasonably comprehensive knowledge of the basic ethical concepts that might be encountered within quantitative social science research. What I quickly learnt is just how different qualitative and quantitative research ethics are.
• As I did not understand the amount of theory that goes behind qualitative ethics, I found myself expecting this course to be more about applying for ethics approval.

Figure 1What are the two lessons learned from this situation? The first relates to an ethical concept. The second relates to a behaviour. Understanding these two lessons goes a long way to finding an ethical self.

The goal of this provocative and constructivist style of teaching was a student as researcher pedagogy, seeking to establish a culture of free expression within the class setting. Using this experiential learning technique (Lewis & Williams, 1994) students were challenged to perform as (ethical) agents in the moment rather than merely observe practices or receive knowledge, as is often the case in research ethics teaching. Tolich (Tolich et al., 2017) vividly recalls these events:

After a little housekeeping, brief introductions and handing out course outlines, I took a digital recorder from my pocket and placed it on the tabletop. I then did something awkward; I switched on the recorder and a tiny red light blinked. With it, the room fell into an uneasy silence.

The reactions were instantaneous. Adam’s¹ reflection (Tolich et al., 2017, p. 246) recalled the pushback capturing the tenseness of the situation the audio-recorder created in the first minute of the class. He said:

The walls seemed at once to close in, and disappear altogether. I felt watched, judged even, and painfully aware of the small device now listening to my every sound. With tightness rising in my throat, nerves and thoughts collided. My immediate reactions ranged from inquisitive to cautious, playful to suspicious, when out of all the consternation emerged a singularly clear voice. “Is this ethical?” asked one of my fellow students. “That’s a great question” responded the lecturer. “What do you mean is that ethical?” Again silence reigned, the lecturer abdicated the floor. As if to help the lecturer out another student translated the question. “She means do you need our consent to have that tape recorder on?” “That is a good question”, the lecturer said. “Do I?”

Are these students’ reactions universal? Would all students have had a gut reaction to the presence of this audio recorder? Would the reader have identified the lecturer’s placement of the audio recorder as a problem? That perception may be the easy bit. Would the reader have had the courage to challenge the lecturer by asking him “What are you doing?” The (Figure 1) cartoon reveals two of these students did have that courage. They both observed a problem and had the mettle to challenge the teacher. In a very short time, the culture of challenging the lecturer was established. This provocation was deliberate. With this action, Tolich sought to disrupt the students’ normal frame of reference for learning, to have them question and critically assess what was going on; the first step in the pathway of transformative learning theory to becoming an autonomous thinker (Mezirow, 1994).

Our frames of reference develop over a lifetime of experience; from these experiences we have learned a set of assumptions about the world and how it functions, and our actions and understanding of experience are shaped by these assumptions (Mezirow, 2000). New experiences are measured against established assumptions, and resulting assumptions are rejected or assimilated accordingly, based on fit. Occasionally, a new experience challenges our assumptions and causes a revision or overhaul of our frame of reference. This table-top exercise was meant to be one such experience.

What is notable in this 60-second intervention is that the students in the class did not have to be prompted or taught about ethics, they naturally evoked their moral intuition, henceforth ethical intuition (defined in this chapter),² to say to the teacher, “That’s not right”. They assumed that it was a requirement that humans ask permission to take or record other people’s ideas. Furthermore, one student translated their concern into an ethical concept called consent. “She means, do you need our informed consent to have that audio recorder on?” In this way, these students were active researchers in their own authentic learning (Rule, 2006). That is the philosophy of the course and this book; it is committed to the idea that to be ethical, one has to recognise ethically salient phenomena, develop one’s assessment of its ethical rightness or wrongness, and lastly, but most importantly, take action.

This situation tested the students’ ability to respond to the activation of the audio recorder. Replications of these tests occur in many of the scenarios in this book where the reader can analyse accounts of research in the same way the students did. In some of these examples of qualitative research presented to the class, the researcher in the case did not gain informed consent.

Turning on the audio recorder was a pivotal point in the students’ learning about ethics. It is worth repeating that this moment had two parts. First, the students demonstrated they had an intuition of what is right and wrong, and second, they were willing to voice their beliefs on what they witnessed in the class. It would be pointless to learn ethics but never use them or feel obliged to act on them to protect others.

Tolich’s (Tolich et al., 2017) response to the two student comments engaged the class further. Without offering a direct response to the query “Do you need our consent?” he eased tensions by affirming that he would need consent if he ever planned to listen to the audio recording, but he had no plans to do that. The audio recording was solely for their collective benefit. He then invited the five of them, all students on the first day of their postgraduate careers, to use these audio recordings to co-write a journal article based on their experience in this lesson and the rest of the course. The audio recordings would or could be their data. He labelled the five students as researchers; they were writing a journal article. They were researching their own education. The suggestion to them that they write a journal article came as much as a surprise as the positioning of the audio recorder in the first place.

To provide some space for their deliberation about what they wanted to do, the audio recorder was turned off and Tolich left the room for a few minutes while the five of them considered the proposal of their working as a group to use the audio recording to write a journal article about their learning of research ethics. When he returned to them, they collectively and enthusiastically agreed to his proposal. They saw benefit in the idea. Why wouldn’t they, since they wanted to co-write a journal article? For all of them, this would be their first article. It was published as Tolich, M., Choe, L., Doesburg, A., Foster, A., Shaw, R., & Wither, D. (2017). Teaching research ethics as active learning: Reading Venkatesh and Goffman as curriculum resources. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 20(3), 243–253.

The classes that followed in the ensuing weeks were embryonic of how this book developed. All class discussions were audio recorded as the students reviewed a number of fictitious and published ethnographic accounts of research practice, always asked to take the perspective of participants in these studies. The students were responding to these texts individually as well as pooling their responses collectively on audiotape in the class. Now that they knew their brief, these students as researchers were equipped to examine how they would feel (and react) if they had been one of the participants, in the various studies, they read. By provoking their ethical intuitions and challenging their moral integrity, henceforth ethical integrity (to act), in the first session, Tolich had disrupted their frame of reference (Mezirow, 2000), therefore provoking a different engagement with each of the subsequent cases discussed in the class.

The students were tasked with identifying ethical conundrums in the various texts provided to them. They were supported to come up with solutions for how the research examples could be done without causing unease to them or the participants in the study. Over the next 13 weeks, the students repeatedly came into the class showing a grasp of what was right and wrong in research. Intuitively, they could identify and resolve complex ethical problems with some support. The teacher’s task was to expand or reinforce their knowledge and encourage them to use it both in the classroom and later when they were in the field.

Writing now, two years later, the pathway the class followed seems obvious, but it was not so clear at the time. It took Tolich some months to grasp the innovative pedagogy of this type of learning in discussion with Tumilty. Postgraduate students are adult learners, often with some practical experience in the workforce or community. Ethical practice in research speaks to the way researchers are in the world and relate to others while conducting research. Ethics education has often either focused on abstract principles or theories sometimes applied to cases or on the rules and regulations relevant to a postgraduate student’s (future) environment.

These kind of approaches arguably do not help students feel they are or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: The one-minute ethicist
• Chapter 2: Organising the reader
• Chapter 3: Is eve’s story Venkatesh’s story?
• Chapter 4: When consent is uninformed, empower participants and activate a reference group
• Chapter 5: Do quantitative and qualitative research have similar ethical considerations?
• Chapter 6: The limits of confidentiality in unstructured interviews and focus groups
• Chapter 7: Irregular types of informed consent in narrative research, autoethnography, photovoice, and participant observation
• Chapter 8: Negotiating ethics within a memorandum of understanding (MOU)
• Chapter 9: Formal ethics review: Research governance is not research ethics
• Chapter 10: Don’t invent the (ethics) wheel: Use TREAD, The research ethics application database
• Chapter 11: Researching in harm’s way
• Chapter 12: Looking back: The path was always there
• Appendix: How teachers can use the book
• References
• Index