Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research (paper)

Notes from Handbook of Qualitative Research - Ch. 6

I have chosen to pick out some bits on ethics and research - again starting with the the basic:

Codes of Ethics

In value-free social science, codes of ethics for professional and academic associations are the conventional format for moral principals.

Informed consent

Proper respect for human freedom generally includes two necessary conditions. First, subjects must agree freely voluntarily to participate - that is, without physical or psychological coercion. Second, their agreement must be based on full and open information. (p. 145)

Deception

...deliberate misrepresentation is forbidden. (p. 145)

Privacy and confidentiality

Confidentiality must be assured as the primary safeguard against unwanted exposure. All personal data ought to be secured or concealed and made public only behind a shield of anonymity. Professional etiquette uniformly concurs that no one deserves harm or embarrassment as a result of research practices. (p. 145)

Accuracy

Fabrications, fraudulent materials, omissions, and contrivances are both nonscientific and unethical. (p. 145)

I think it is easy to see how all of these have to be considered during research and how if they are not the validity of inquiry can be compromised. As Christians (2005) says himself when these inhabit the living world of research then they generate complex issues. In particular, I don't intend to have a value-free approach - however what is valued must be explicit and considered by participants. Each aspect of a code such as this can be broken only in the light of a greater ethic associated with valuing participants and their shared understanding.


Feminist Communitarianism

Social ethics

Over the past decade, social and feminist ethics have made a radical break with individual autonomy and rationalist presumption of canonical ethics... (pp. 148-9)

Rather than searching for neutral principles to which all parties can appeal, social ethics rests on a complex view of moral judgments as integrating into an organic whole various perspectives - everyday experience, beliefs about the good, and feelings of approval and shame - in terms of human relations and structures. (p. 149)

Compassion and nurturance resolve conflicting responsibilities among people, and as such these standards are totally the opposite of merely avoiding harm. (p. 149)

Accumulated wisdom, moral meaning from our own choices of decency, and the ongoing summons of the Other together reintroduce love, happiness, sympathy, and beauty into a modern, nonabsolutionist, but principled theory of morals. (p. 149)

Humans are defined as communicative beings within the fabric of everyday life. Through dialogic encounter, subjects create life together and nurture one another's moral obligation to it. Levinas's ethics presumes and articulates a radical ontology of social beings in relation. (p. 150)

A Feminist Communitarian Model

...the mission of social science research is enabling community life to prosper - equipping people to come to mutually held conclusions. The aim is not fulsome data per se, but community transformation. The received view assumes that research advances society's interests by feeding our individual capacity to reason and make calculated decisions. Research is intended to be collaborative in its design and participatory in its execution. Rather than ethics codes in the files of academic offices and research reports prepared for clients, the participants themselves are given a forum to activate polis mutually. In contrast to utilitarian experimentalism, the substantive conceptions of the good that drive the problems reflects the conceptions of the community rather than the expertise researchers or funders. (p. 151)

Interpretive Sufficiency

In contrast to an experimentalism of instrumental efficiency, this paradigm seeks to open up the social world in all its dynamic dimensions. The thick notion of sufficiency supplants the thinness of technical , exterior, and statistically precise received view. Rather than reducing social issues to financial and administrative problems for politicians, social science research enables people to come to terms with their everyday experience themselves. (p. 151)

Interpretative sufficiency means taking seriously lives that are loaded with multiple interpretations and grounded in cultural complexity. (p. 152)

Multivocal and Cross-Cultural Representation

With the starting hypothesis that all human cultures have something to say, social science research recognizes particular cultural values consistent with universal human dignity. Interpretative sufficiency in its multicultural dimension locates persons in a non-competitive, non-hierarchical relationship to the larger moral universe. It helps persons imagine how things could be different in the everyday world. It imagines new forms of human transformation and emancipation. It enacts those transformations through dialogue. (p. 153)

Moral Discernment

Communities are woven together by narratives that invigorate their common understanding of good and evil, happiness and reward, the meaning of life and death. Recovering and refashioning moral vocabulary help to amplify our deepest humanness. Researchers are not constituted as ethical selves antecedently, but moral discernment unfolds dialectically between researchers. (p. 154)

Our widely shared moral convictions are developed through discourse within a community. These communities, where moral discourse is nurtured and shared, are a radical alternative to the utilitarianism of modernity. But in feminist communitarianism, communities are entered from the universal. The total opposite of an ethics of individual autonomy is universal human solidarity. Our obligation to sustain one another defines our existence. (p. 154)

OK - that is enough for now. Time for a walk...


Christians, C.G. (2005) Ethics and politics in qualitative research. In Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Ed) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research 3rd Edition, Sage Publications, California, USA.