The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research Ethics

Ron Iphofen,Martin Tolich

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526448705
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

This handbook is a much-needed and in-depth review of the distinctive set of ethical considerations which accompanies qualitative research. This is particularly crucial given the emergent, dynamic and interactional nature of most qualitative research, which too often allows little time for reflection on the important ethical responsibilities and obligations Contributions from leading international researchers have been carefullyorganised into six key thematic sections:

Part One: Thick Descriptions Of Qualitative Research Ethics
Part Two: Qualitative ResearchEthics By Technique
Part Three: Ethics As Politics
Part Four: Qualitative Research Ethics With Vulnerable Groups
Part Five: Relational Research Ethics
Part Six: Researching Digitally

This Handbook is a one-stop resource on qualitative research ethics across the social sciences that draws on the lessons learned and the successful methods for surmounting problems – the tried and true, and the new.

Part I Thick Descriptions of Qualitative Research Ethics

We open this collection with a discussion from Martyn Hammersley on a set of concepts which go to the core of ethical discussion generally and which highlight the particular concerns of qualitative researchers –the situational nature of value-decisions. Hammersley is renowned for his stance against the increasingly formalized procedural nature of ethical review and regulation and its consequential tendency to restrict the autonomous practice of qualitative enquiry. Adhering to the core values of this perspective requires interpretation of value principles in the research site or setting itself. The ‘thick description’ conventionally necessitated in qualitative research helps tease out the values, standards, and principles deemed appropriate with, to and for those participating in the study. Anticipatory applications of such values are entirely innappropriate, ineffective and, worse, might do more harm than good both to participants and to the research products. Hammersley's careful drawing out of the dimensions of complex ethical concepts can help in on-site decision-making and, ultimately, may be reflected in the improved understanding of research ethics regulators.

The in-depth analysis of core ethical concepts is taken further in David Carpenter's piece. He compares the methods applied for quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis with the various moral philosophies employed for justifying researchers’ actions. It is clear that the principles derived from biomedical research do not easily transpose to social science and even less so to qualitative methods. By a re-framing of the elements of the key principles, Carpenter demonstrates a resonance with those who stress the importance of reflexivity in research, the continuous application of ‘practical reason’ to the work being engaged in and, as a consequence, the emergence of virtuous research and the virtuous researcher. Carpenter avoids this becoming the vain search for ideals by drawing on sources of practical guidance as to how these virtues might be accomplished.

Natasha Mauthner's chapter focuses on reflexivity. In some respects she regards the term as limited as she delves even deeper into the underlying epistemic and ontological concerns of qualitative research ethics in exploring what ‘new materialism’ can offer the ethical researcher. The approach explicated by Mauthner both challenges some conventional assumptions of qualitative research (social contructionist, naturalist and discursive ontologies) but takes to their furthest extremes other elements of the perspective – the representationalist and the performative. The move from reflexivity to what is known as ‘diffraction', since Donna Haraway, requires some shifts in thinking about how moral agency and, therefore, ethical responsibility is constituted in research practice. In fact Mauthner claims ‘methods’ bring into being the concerns of qualitative research –in drawing on Karen Barad's concept of agential realism the world is ‘mattered’ or ‘performed’ into existence. Mauthner argues that this delivers a posthumanist rather than a normative ethics in which the focus is on the researcher's practice(s). The conceptual complexity entailed in this new feminist materialist approach may challenge the abilities of qualitative researchers to ‘rework their established ways of doing research'.

While there is nothing particularly novel in the advocacy of feminist epistemologies and methodologies, Andrea Doucet's chapter traverses the complex contours of what has become a diverse and overlapping range of issues and concerns. Anyone not versed in the multiple threads that constitute feminist research will find this an almost encyclopaedic starting point. But Doucet moves on from these traditions with a development of Lorraine Code's ‘ecological imaginaries’ and how these influence both making knowledge and ethical research practice. Doucet offers suggestions about how these insights can be applied in practice but, necessarily and once again, the burden of responsibility and ‘response-ability’ falls on the researcher, in the research setting, to implement the implied epistemic ethics.

Mark Israel examines the impact of research ethics hegemony by way of a geographically global perspective. His primary focus of concern is with the export of Northern and Westernized principlist values to the global South. Additionally, he advocates for further insight into the indigenous ethics of different cultures rather than the imposition of regulatory systems established elsewhere, no matter the temptations of supposedly proven ‘convenience'. This geographic ethical imperialism repeats the errors of earlier phases of research ethics development in the North; a privileging of positivist and biomedical approaches to research design. Worse still, novice administrators appear more concerned with the bureaucratic application of principles than with the insight and flexible discretion required of social science in general and qualitative research in particular. Moreover, the prioritization of individual autonomy over collective, communal decision-making, of written over vocalized consenting, and implicit assumptions about linguistic competence all represent a certain universalist principlism that fails to recognize the specific needs and wants of indigenous people. All of these elements are instructive to understanding the ethical concerns of qualitative researchers documented throughout the rest of this Handbook.

It is often in response to this ‘global capital’ (in Mark Israel's terms) and the dominance of principlism that qualitative researchers have sought to be innovative both in method and in sensitivity to the needs of their participants. Helen Kara's chapter continues to challenge the ethical imperialism raised by all the Part 1 authors by drawing out the elements of emancipatory research and assessing how each of these elements contributes to ethical qualitative research practice. The two key underlying elements that Kara draws on in understanding the goals of ‘democratizing research’ are social justice and care. The resistance to ‘colonialized’ research brings together a broad range of communal and activist topic areas relating to feminism, disability, linguistic dominance, sexuality, ethnicity and socioeco-nomic status. There seems little doubt that such an approach is necessarily activist, participatory and political and that it lends itself more easily to qualitative approaches than to any other paradigm. Kara closes with a consideration of insider/outsider research roles and notes that the latter may be necessary for fully democratizing research without requiring any drive to objectivity and/or neutrality that is implied by those of a more principlist persuasion.

Taken together these six chapters in Part 1 reveal a thick description for the positions taken by the authors in the rest of the Handbook. All of the elements raised here are re-visited by the authors that follow in diverse settings, with diverse peoples and covering the breadth of methodologies that characterizes qualitative research.

1 Values in Social Research

Martyn Hammersley

Introduction

There is an understandable tendency today for many qualitative researchers’ interest in ethical issues to focus heavily on gaining approval from ethics committees, this generally being required before any investigation can proceed. Yet, of course, ethical research conduct cannot be reduced to compliance with the dictates of ethics committees. Indeed, it should not be assumed that such compliance is always ethical (Hammersley, 2006, 2009a). Furthermore, social scientists’ concern with ethics predates the introduction of ethical regulation.

My focus here will be on some of the key values that researchers take into account, and should take into account, in making decisions during the course of their inquiries. It is important to be as clear as possible about the nature of these values, about their implications, and about how they relate to the situations in which researchers must act. In the context of ethical regulation, there is a propensity for these values to be turned into procedural requirements, but this is to misconstrue their character, and to misunderstand the practice of social, and especially qualitative, inquiry.

The role of values in social science has long been a contested issue. Some have insisted that research is, or should be, value-free, but in recent times this idea has generally been rejected. Certainly, if what is meant by ‘value-freedom’ is that research should involve no value commitments then this is unachievable, and even attempting to achieve it would be undesirable. There can be little human activity that is value-free in this sense, because valued goals are almost always involved. However, in fact, the main advocates of value-freedom or value-neutrality, notably Max Weber, did not put forward this misguided proposal: their argument was that the goal of research should be restricted to the production of factual knowledge, specifically excluding practical evaluations of the phenomena being investigated, and restricting policy recommendations to the conditional identification of effective means for achieving given goals (see Weber, 1949). What Weber rejected, then, was the idea that research should be directly geared to pursuing practical outcomes or political causes (Hammersley, 2017a). It was necessarily committed to epistemic values, notably truth, but should be neutral as regards the practical values that its findings might serve. Furthermore, those on both sides of this debate have recognized that there are also ethical restrictions on how social research should be pursued; though there is less agreement about which ethical values ought to be given priority, and what role(s) they should play.¹

1 Thus, the translation of Weber’s term ‘Wertfreiheit’ as ‘ethical neutrality’ is as misleading as the phrase ‘value freedom’. In the field of philosophy, there are those who seem to reject entirely the claims of morality, as conventionally understood. This is true of Nietzsche (see Leiter, 2001), and more recently of Bernard Williams (2011).

So, against this complex background, my main purpose in this chapter is to try to provide a clear conception of some of the key values informing qualitative research, and of how they function in relation to it.

What are Values?

The term ‘value’ has come to be used in a variety of ways. In one sense it is an economic concept, relating for example (in terms of much current economics) to what consumers wish to buy and their preferences amongst different goods. A broader version of this same sense concerns calculation of benefits against costs associated with various potential courses of action. Proposed research projects are sometimes evaluated in these terms, not least by ethics committees. A rather different meaning of the term relates to what ought to be valued over and above what is likely to be found immediately satisfying, or even what is judged to be in the general interest: here the focus is on standards concerning how people should be treated on principle.

Whichever sense of the term is adopted, values serve as standards by which we evaluate outcomes, people, and actions. Yet determining their implications in particular situations always requires interpretation, which may or may not be a matter of conscious deliberation. So, there is a distinction to be drawn between value principles, which are general in nature, and value judgments, which assess particular courses of action, people, situations, etc. according to one or more values. At the same time, we must not see principles as completely independent of their application: they are typically associated with notional exemplars that guide decisions about when they are relevant, and shape what they are taken to mean. The exemplars associated with a particular value principle may change over time, and can vary amongst those making evaluations. Indeed, the relationship between value principles and particular value judgments is a dialectical one. We can think of principles as sedimented knowledge about dimensions that have been found relevant in interpreting particular types of issue in the past. For example, the principle of minimizing harm may be associated for many people with the harm that is potentially involved in some medical trials, and this will shape the application of this principle in other contexts. In the case of respecting autonomy, this principle may be associated with ideas about what are regarded as unacceptable instances of covert surveillance. And, once again, this will influence how that principle is interpreted. Principles serve as important reminders, but we must be careful not to reify them.

The most fundamental point here is that it is a mistake to assume that value principles carry immediate injunctions for action: as already noted, they always have to be interpreted in the context of particular situations. Furthermore, their interpretation may well involve complex and contentious matters. For example, there can be disagreement not just about what is serious as against minor harm, but even about what is and is not harmful. Is asking a question that an informant finds distressing harmful? Consider two cases: a question about parents or guardians that upsets a young child who has recently lost her father, and a question to a teacher accused of sexual harassment about the allegation. In the first case the distress is inadvertent, and difficult to avoid if basic information about family background is to be collected. And, indeed, even discussions of children and bereavement may give relatively little attention to this issue (see, for instance, Brewer and Sparkes, 2011). In the second example, even if the teacher has given consent, this may not avoid the distress that results. And in both cases we can ask whether the di...