Qualitative Ethics in Practice

Martin Tolich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134824977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

Neither ethics committees nor qualitative researchers can predict the types of ethical dilemmas that will happen in the field, only that they will routinely occur. In Qualitative Ethics in Practice, a team of fifteen top researchers from various disciplines and nationalities offer ethical strategies unique to qualitative researchers for those "big ethical moments" beyond what can be predicted by ethics committees. Ideally structured for qualitative classes that tackle ethics issues, the book

-calls for an ethical code unique to the practice of qualitative research;

-uses a variety of cases from education, community development, tourism, family, and other settings to examine how researchers addressed ethical dilemmas in practice, including the infamous Belfast Project;

-highlights some relevant models and programs being developed that may lead to solutions.

11PART 1

Uniqueness of Qualitative Research12

13CHAPTER 1

Qualitative Ethics in Practice

Martin Tolich

This book has a different starting point from others that concentrate on qualitative research ethics; it focuses on how qualitative researchers experience ethical dilemmas in the field and how they resolve them, not on how ethics committees review qualitative research. Moral panic (Hoonaard, 2001; Fitzgerald, 2005), ethics creep (Haggerty, 2004), travelers and trolls (Pritchard, 2002) are common accounts social scientists have used to characterize their uneasy relationship with ethics committees (Institutional Review Boards in the USA, Research Ethics Boards in Canada, Human Research Ethics Committees in Australia, and Research Ethics Committees in the UK). Israel and Hay (2006, p. 1) story the relationship as one where “social scientists are angry and frustrated, their work is being constrained and distorted by regulators of ethical practice who do not necessarily understand social science research.” Although mindful of these critiques, my position on these questions has focused less on outward critiques and more on the ethical considerations of qualitative research itself. Additionally, for most of the past fifteen years I have served on ethics committees, mostly as chairperson, and recently I worked to establish a not-for-profit company operating a noninstitutional ethics committee. The New Zealand Ethics Committee reviews applications gratis from researchers in local and central government and NGOs along with community researchers who are routinely disenfranchised from formal ethical review. Ethics committees play an important role in protecting participants from harm, yet their ability to evaluate qualitative research is incomplete. Obscured from ethics committees and researchers alike are the ethical events that unfold in the field.

Looking inward rather than outward led to identifying three fundamental issues facing both qualitative researchers and ethics committees alike. First, neither ethics committees nor qualitative researchers can 14predict with any certainty the types of ethical dilemmas that will emerge in the field. Any assessment of ethics is at best partial, and qualitative researchers, not ethics committees, must assume responsibility for any new issues that may harm those participants who take part in their research. Second, the ethical dilemmas that face qualitative researchers in the field form part of the research findings so that others may read how researchers reflexively dealt with big ethical moments. Third, qualitative research is so epistemologically unique that it likely deserves its own code of ethics that integrates qualitative research’s emergent and iterative research design.

Qualitative Research Ethics in Practice begins by exploring qualitative researchers’ responsibility to their participants by examining the uniqueness of qualitative research and responding to qualitative researchers’ need for relevant ethics codes and guidance. This book is conceived in this spirit and takes its starting place in Guillemin and Gilliam’s (2004, p. 261) provocative scenario presented in their seminal article “Ethics, Reflexivity, and ‘Ethically Important Moments’ in Research.” They wrote,

Picture this scene. You are a researcher working on a study examining women’s experiences of heart disease. You are interviewing Sonia, a woman in her late 40s with diagnosed heart disease. Sonia lives on a remote farming property in a rural region. She is married and has one teenage daughter living at home with herself and her husband. The interview is progressing well. Over a cup of tea in Sonia’s kitchen, you inquire about the impact of heart disease on her life. Sonia stops and closes her eyes. After a few moments’ silence, you notice tears welling up in Sonia’s eyes. Sonia tells you that she is not coping—not because of her heart disease, but because she has just found out that her husband has been sexually abusing her daughter since she was a child.

Guillemin and Gillam make reference to the following concerns yet leave their resolution to the imagination: Should the interview continue? Should the researcher turn off the audio recorder? Should the researcher telephone the police? Is it ethical for the researcher to provide counseling? These are all serendipitous ethical questions that face any qualitative researcher in the field and are not predicted in formal ethics review. Punch (1994) articulated a similar pressing need a decade before for qualitative researchers to understand themselves and their ethical dilemmas that occur in the field and how isolated researchers address them. Punch (1994, p. 89) said,

[They] often have to be resolved situationally, and even spontaneously, without the luxury of being able to turn first to consult a more experienced colleague. [Moreover], the generality of codes does not help us to make fine distinctions that arise at the interactional level in participant observation 15studies, where the reality of their field setting may feel far removed from the refinements of scholarly debate and ethical niceties.

Besides coining the phrase “big ethics moments” to describe these spontaneous events, Guillemin and Gillam make one other fundamental insight: distinguishing, if not divorcing the relationship between procedural (or formal) ethics review and ethical dilemmas that manifest as “ethics in practice.” Sonia’s story is an example of ethics in practice, a big ethical moment not predicted in formal ethics review. This book picks up on this task and emulates Miller, Birch, Mauthner, and Jessop’s (2002, 2012) Ethics in Qualitative Research by having researchers at various stages of their academic careers tell their stories of how they addressed big ethical moments in the field.

I use three of the big ethical moments that Miller and colleagues identify and resolve as case studies in my teaching. None of these three dilemmas were predicted in an ethics review, and each required the researchers to reflexively address the ethical issues.

1. A community gatekeeper who recruited potential informants significantly enhanced Miller’s study of Bangladeshi female immigrants in England. When Miller (Miller & Bell, 2002) met the women en masse to introduce the study and seek their informed consent, she sensed an obvious coercion: the women seemed compelled to take part in her study. Miller could have carried on with the interview but chose to employ a different consent process often used when researching children. Whereas parents may have consented for children to take part in the research, the researcher can seek voluntary assent.
2. Bell’s (Bell & Nutt, 2002) big ethical moment stemmed from her dual roles as a social worker and as an academic researcher. The social worker’s code of ethics requires notification to authorities when finding the vulnerable exposed to potential harm. The academic does not have a similar responsibility; in fact, their responsibility is more toward protecting the research participant from harm. When interviewing a male foster caregiver, Bell noticed an explicit poster in the hallway of the foster home. She was conflicted between protecting her participant from harm and assuming her professional self’s role to report the person. My postgraduate students reading this case study tend to side with their either professional or academic selves. Trainee teachers and social workers applaud her decision to report the man. Students without professional allegiances believe the reporting harmed the man, as the participant information sheet was written from an academic perspective, with no warning that researcher participants could be turned in.
3. Duncombe and Jessop (2002) provide an intimate reflection into the mechanics of how qualitative researchers recruit research participants. The chapter entitled “Doing Rapport and the Ethics of Faking Friendship” dissects the rapport researchers use to cultivate potential participants to generate their research sample. When researchers later meet these intimates in everyday life, the duplicity of the rapport is exposed. Duncombe and Jessop’s (2002, p. 12) “advice is that interviewers should continue to worry about these issues as they emerge in each piece of research and each individual interview.”

16There are many other big ethical cases documented in the Miller and colleagues book, and some—but by no means all—are found in the chapters of this book. Writing and reading accounts of how researchers resolved big ethical moments makes the crises appear routine and socializes qualitative researchers to the expectation that they, too, are likely to experience similar moments.

PART ONE: UNIQUENESS OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

In Chapter 2 I locate the uniqueness of qualitative research by reclaiming qualitative research’s own history rather than relying on psychology to source its ethical horror stories (Tolich, 2014). Chapter 2 records how routine it is for qualitative authors to demonize Zimbardo’s “Stanford Prison Study” and Milgram’s “Obedience Studies” as horror stories (Wiles, 2013) without contrasting them with a number of recent examples of ethically dubious qualitative research. Qualitative research has reached a maturity whereby it should examine its own ethical practice before poaching from other disciplines. Whyte (1981), Ellis (1995), and Venkatesh (2008) provide a good starting point to recognize how qualitative researchers are capable of generating ethical dilemmas unique to qualitative research. For example, Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day may be an ethical train wreck, but it is an excellent source of how not to conduct research. Assigning the book to postgraduate students allows them to locate obvious ethical problems and suggest solutions. Milgram, Humphreys, or Zimbardo are routinely considered train wrecks, yet there is much to learn from a forensic analysis of these supposed horror stories.

Chapter 3’s focus also looks inward, directing attention to the different techniques qualitative researchers use—ethnography, focus groups, photo voice, autoethnography, narrative research—and how their “saturated” jargon generates specific ethical issues that warrants their own code of ethics. For example, the core taken-for-granted concepts of anonymity and confidentiality have nuanced meanings in qualitative research. Chapter 3 suggests deleting the concept of anonymity from the qualitative researcher’s lexicon, as once heard or transcribed, an interview cannot be anonymized. Replacing anonymity with de-identifying data may be more appropriate for qualitative researchers.

Additionally, there are severe conceptual limitations for confidentiality that are not found in any ethics code. Confidentiality may protect participants from strangers but not necessarily other research participants at the same research site (Tolich, 2004). If confidentiality is the only concept qualitative researchers can use to protect the identity of the participants, they must establish warning disclaimers.

17In looking at a number of qualitative research techniques Chapter 3 addresses their unique complexities one by one. Do focus group interviews generate the same ethical issues as an unstructured one-on-one interview? No, they don’t, and I limit focus group ethical assurances to caveat emptor—let the buyer (or participants) beware that focus group researchers can offer few ethical assurances (Tolich, 2009). Equally, narrative research may resemble ethnography—both use unstructured interviews—but the two methodologies are sufficiently distinct, especially in terms of their respective practice of informed consent, that they may require different informed consent processes. Narrative researchers should not use informed consent when the research question they attempt to answer does not develop until after the first data collection; they should use either broad consent or process consent. This means there may be natural limits to informed consent in qualitative research that only reveal themselves in ethics in practice.

Chapter 4 examines a curious exception to debates about qualitative research ethics. For no apparent reason mixed methods—the combination of quantitative and a qualitative research design within the same project—has been exempt from the controversy that has marred the paradigm war between biomedical-dominated ethics committees and qualitative research (Haggerty, 2004; Hoonaard, 2001). Not only has mixed methods been exempt from these debates, Hesse-Biber and Johnson (2013) note their surprise that a subdiscipline’s journal as established as the Journal of Mixed Methods Research “has not yet published an article centered on ethical issues in conducting mixed methods research.” Chapter 4 provides a tentative explanation for this omission. Ethical assurances have different manifestations in qualitative and quantitative research. Anonymity and confidentiality don’t mix; they are mutually exclusive. The ephemeral relationship found in the statement “filling in this questionnaire implies informed consent” has no equal in the embedded relationships typically found in qualitative research.

The mixed methods motto, the dictatorship of the research question, unravels in a similar manner as it does for a narrative research question. What specific techniques are participants consenting to when the research question may differ between the two stages of the research? A systematic search of the literature for exemplars of mixed methods researchers who account for their ethical issues found little insight; instead, hollow warnings to “be careful out there” represent ethical guidance for mixed methods research. The chapter ends by offering a number of suggestions that mixed methods researchers could use in both their research and their teaching.

While the first four chapters claim that qualitative research is sufficiently unique to warrant its own code of ethics, Chapter 5 provides 18a resolution. Will van den Hoonaard, an architect of Canada’s “Tri-Council Policy Statement on Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans” on qualitative research, outlines the making(s) of a qualitative code of ethics chapter that captures the emergent nature of qualitative research’s ethics in practice. The first part of Hoonaard’s chapter explains social science’s criticism of the “First Tri-Council Policy Statement” in 1998. The second part of the chapter provides an abridged version of the chapter on qualitative research ethics in TCPS 2 (the “Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans, Second Edition”), inclusive of providing a definition of qualitative research, explaining the inductive nature of its epistemology as well as its uniqueness, and how its emergent research design causes problems for one-off ethics review. Rather than informing ethics committees how to address these issues, the code’s focus is more on how researchers and ethics committees can address emergent issues such as ongoing consent that develop in the field. The Canadian Code emphasis is on social science, but Hoonaard explains how the social science research community chose qualitative research strategically, as if to position itself as far from possible from the positivist epistemology that underscored the 1998 version of TCPS. This chapter is unique and serves as an exemplar for an international ethics code for qualitative research.

The following ten chapters in Part Two ask scholars to also look inward at their own research to recognize and discuss ethical dilemmas that emerged in their research that neither they nor the ethics committee predicted in advance and how they addressed them. Collectively these experiences provide a wealth of knowledge to the execution of ethical qualitative research that generates a body of knowledge that is distinctive qualitative research ethics in practice.

PART TWO: ETHICAL MOMENTS

Death: The Ethical Third Rail

Chapters 6 through 9 examine the ethics in practice of researchers whose big ethical moments are accentuated by different aspects of death, creating unforeseen and imagined vulnerabilities for researchers, their ethics committees, and their participants. Death manifests itself to ethics committees as an acute form of research governance (Iphofen, 2009), where the ethics committees’ natural inclination is to manage risk by protecting the institution and, more likely, rejecting the ethics application (Dyregrov, 2004). Death has no equal threat, and ethics committees treat it as if were an untouchable third rail. In the United States Social Security is the untouchable third rail that politicians will not touch. In Canada no 19government dares to touch health care. In research ethics the third rail is ethics committees’ resistance to permitting researchers to engage the bereaved in research, working from...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• PART 1. Uniqueness of Qualitative Research
• PART 2. Ethical Moments
• References
• Index
• About the Authors