Everyday Ethics

Reflections on Practice

Gretchen Rossman, Sharon Rallis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317978374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Everyday Ethics: Reflections on Practice looks at the moments that demand moral consideration and ethical choice that arise as part of a researcher's daily practice. Drawing on principles of systematic inquiry as transparent and grounded in conceptual reasoning, it describes research as praxis and the researcher as practitioner. The researcher is a decision-maker for both procedural and ethical matters that attend the conduct of research, especially when the research is focused on human wellbeing. Every decision about data collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation has moral dimensions.

Morally compelling moments demand a reflexivity ('research praxis') – that is, informed action, the back-and-forth between reasoning and action. Methodological wisdom emerges during the cyclical process of inquiry that is doing, thinking about the doing through a moral lens, and doing again. This book invites us to deepen our understanding of everyday ethics, and contributes to the ongoing discourse about research as moral practice, conducted by such reflexive practitioners.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

Everyday ethics: reflections on practice

Gretchen B. Rossman^a and Sharon F. Rallis^b

^aCenter for International Education, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 277 Hills South, 111 Thatcher Way, Amherst, MA 01003, USA; ^bSchool of Education, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 252 Hills South, 111 Thatcher Way, Amherst, MA 01003, USA

This introductory article frames the contributions for this issue on everyday ethics – moments that demand moral considerations and ethical choices that researchers encounter. We discuss concerns raised within the research community about the tendency to observe merely obligatory ethical procedures as outlined in Human Subjects Review regulations. We argue that these procedural rituals are manifestly insufficient for the moral challenges of ongoing and evolving research with people; we call for deeper engagement with the ethical dilemmas and defining moments that arise in the everyday conduct of research. We argue that considerations of ethics should be central to establishing the rigor or trustworthiness of research projects. Drawing on principles of systematic inquiry as transparent and grounded in conceptual reasoning, we describe research as praxis and the researcher as practitioner.

This introductory article frames the seven contributions for this special issue on everyday ethics – moments that demand moral considerations and ethical choices that arise as part of a researcher’s daily practice. We begin by discussing concerns raised within the research community about the tendency to observe merely obligatory ethical procedures as outlined in Human Subjects Review regulations and frequently encoded in the iconic informed consent letter. We argue that these procedural rituals are manifestly insufficient for the moral challenges of ongoing and evolving research with people; we call for deeper engagement with the ethical dilemmas and defining moments that arise in the everyday conduct of research. We then broaden this critique to argue that considerations of ethics should be central to establishing the rigor or trustworthiness of research projects.

Drawing on principles of systematic inquiry as transparent and grounded in conceptual reasoning, we next describe research as praxis and the researcher as practitioner. We argue that the researcher is a decision-maker about both procedural and ethical matters that attend the conduct of research, especially when the research is focused on human well-being (Hostetler 2005). We posit that every decision about data collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation has moral dimensions. These decisions are ongoing, demanding iterative reflection and action. The researcher can thus be read as a moral practitioner (see Sikes and Goodson 2003). We argue that morally grounded researchers are ethically reflexive practitioners.

Within the notion of ethics in practice, or everyday ethics (we draw these terms from Guillemin and Gillam [2004], although others have used them), we further argue that ethically defining moments demand that the researcher critically reflect on ways that decisions taken in-the-moment have ethical implications. In qualitative inquiry particularly, engaging with participants in morally grounded ways demands a reflexive stance on the relational ethics which attend this practice (Rossman and Rallis 2003). As the seven articles depict, morally compelling moments demand a reflexivity that we call ‘research praxis’ – that is, informed action, the back-and-forth between reasoning and action. Methodological wisdom emerges during the cyclical process of inquiry that is doing, thinking about the doing through a moral lens, and doing again.

The seven articles in this special issue invite us to deepen our understanding of and contribute to the ongoing discourse about research as moral practice, conducted by such reflexive practitioners.

Beyond the procedural to the relational

Over the past several years, our work (Rallis 2006a, 2006b; Rallis and Rossman 2003, 2004; Rallis, Rossman, and Gajda 2007; Rossman and Rallis 1998, 2003) has explored the concern – also raised by others – that the moral principles guiding research practice have become trivialized and proceduralized. The principles of beneficence, respect for persons, and justice that are encoded in institutional policies for the protection of human subjects in research have been subsumed by attending to procedural matters only. We make this claim based on our years of practice as academics, researchers, and supervisors of dissertation research. The public discourse – in university hallways and classrooms – focuses on getting the procedural matters right, rather than on getting the ethical matters right. However, the ethical matters that arise in the everyday conduct of research demand deep engagement with how we relate to the persons who participate in a study.

In everyday research practice, questions about how the researcher relates to participants – ethical matters – have fallen under the jurisdiction of institutional review boards (IRBs), which are charged with ensuring the protection of human subjects in all research conducted under the auspices of that institution. Such boards serve important defining and policing roles in judging what is considered ethical practice with human subjects, frequently requiring researchers to pass the appropriate and informative Collaborative Institutional Review Board Training Initiative modules (CITI at https://www.citiprogram.org/citidocuments/aboutus.htm). While the history and central issues associated with the protection of human subjects are developed in the CITI training, review boards could assume a greater local responsibility to ensure that discussion and debate about ethical practice go hand-in-hand with their procedural requirements and are consistent with the assumptions and methods of particular disciplines. For example, universities could (and some have) establish specialized review boards that specifically discuss the ethical issues that arise within qualitative research projects (Shweder 2006; see also AE Forum 2006, an entire issue of American Ethnologist devoted to ethics). Sadly, this is not often the case. Such boards tend to articulate a set of procedures that simplifies what are complex ethical issues that are ‘seen, unseen, and unforeseen’ (Milner 2007, 388). As Guillemin and Gillam note, ‘there is no direct or necessary relationship between ethics committee approval of a research project and what actually happens when the research is undertaken’ (2004, 269).

As we have witnessed over the years, this has had important consequences: graduate students with whom we work, speak in coded language about IRB approval, appearing to believe that such approval certifies their research as ‘ethical’. At times, engaging with the thorny issues associated with ongoing ethical practice appears tedious, unproductive, and unnecessary. Moreover, cultural differences in interpretation of standard forms, such as informed consent, are side-lined or ignored; discussions about the ethical representation of what participants have shared are lost; and the epistemological questions about the knowledge claims made in written texts gloss over the crucial relational foundation that generated those claims (Gunzenhauser 2006).

Obtaining informed consent from participants – and the forms that police this procedure – has become emblematic of the codification and bureaucratization of moral reasoning and ethical practice. Sample informed consent letters are part and parcel of a review board’s required procedures. In attempting to codify relational matters – that is, interactions with people – these letters ignore or do not consider the multiple ways of reading what appear to be straight-forward procedures. Moreover, as noted above, there is a troubling lack of inter-cultural awareness embedded in the forms and their attendant explanations. They typically provide no direction for how a researcher could ethically mediate between the demands of a US-based (and Eurocentric) university and the sensibilities of quite different cultural groups. For example, informed consent presumes that an individual can freely give his or her assent to participate in a research study. However, this assumption does not travel well across cultural borders, especially into the more collectivist-oriented groups. What does this notion of individual rights mean in a context where the concept of the individual is blurred and the group is paramount, where one’s obligations extend well beyond the self? And what happens to the assumption that an individual is free to participate in or withdraw from a study at any time without prejudice when one is a civil servant, obligated by ties to the government to participate? Further, how does the requirement that a participant sign the informed consent letter get read in cultures where literacy is not prevalent or, more ominous, where giving one’s consent by signing a document or making one’s mark on it puts one at risk from an authoritarian regime or a government? Finally, how can the researcher give even reasonable assurances of protection from harm without fully understanding the consequences of participating in a study for women and girls in deeply patriarchal societies?

Sadly, the cultural critique that these questions spring from is only one of the many considerations not acknowledged in IRB materials but often present in everyday research practice, as several of the articles in this special issue discuss. We should also note that each of the above questions arose in the context of ‘ethically important moments’ (Guillemin and Gillam 2004) that could not be foreseen in mere procedures. We argue that attending merely to procedures, at the cost of fully engaging with the ethical and relational matters of research with people, represents a facile misapplication of the ‘technical compendia that masquerade as methodology’ (Nixon and Sikes 2003, 5), as applied to ethical research practice.

Historically, qualitative methodologists introduced the term trustworthiness as a substitute for the limited concepts of reliability and validity (as articulated by Lincoln and Guba in their classic 1985 work). In this work, they give a nod to the relational in such procedural strategies as member checks, a decidedly infelicitous term that is matched in technocratic language only by their prescription that the researcher should leave an audit trail (Lincoln and Guba 1985). While the construct of trustworthiness has become more vibrant and contested in the past 20-plus years, engaging deeply with the demand that relational matters matter has not come to the fore-front of inquiry. Davies and Dodd note, ‘Understanding ethics to involve trustfulness, openness, honesty, respectfulness, carefulness, and constant attentiveness means that ethics is not treated as a separate part of our research – a form that is filled in for the ethics committee and forgotten’ (2002, 281).

Viewing the moral principles that guide research practice as relational centers the inquiry on people over procedures. Symonette observes that ‘focusing on the WHO in research humanizes what is too often a set of sterile, routinized tasks’ (2009, 282, emphasis in original). She asks, ‘Who is conceiving, designing, engaging, implementing, and inferring during systematic inquiry processes with Whom in what ways toward what ends?’ (281, emphasis in original). Valuing participants and recognizing the potential interpersonal impact of the inquiry help to ensure that researchers are moral practitioners. Their methodological decisions, therefore, are grounded in what Kirkhart has termed ‘interpersonal validity’, that is, ‘the trustworthiness of understandings emanating from personal interactions’ (1995, 4). Reason and Rowan elaborate, ‘This dimension of validity concerns itself with the skills and sensitivities of the researcher in how one uses oneself as a knower, as an inquirer’ (1981, in Kirkhart 1995, 4). This concept of interpersonal validity intertwines ethics and trustworthiness with rigor.

Ethics, trustworthiness, and rigor¹

For research to be credible, we must trust in it. This assertion is a truism but one that remains mysterious in methodological writings. Just what is meant by trust? Trust in what? Trust in whom? And what does the derived term trustworthiness mean? Judgments about the trustworthiness of a study are typically made according to the normative rules and standards of a particular discipline, often relying on procedural rules as criteria. Traditionally, these rules have stipulated the procedures to follow to ensure the reliability, validity, objectivity, and generalizability of a study. These canons imply that the extent to which one can trust in the soundness of a study depends on whether appropriate procedures were followed – the technical matters. Was the sample size appropriate? Was the researcher objective? Was the instrumentation reliable? Were the data gathered appropriately? Notably absent are considerations of the principles and practice of ethical research. Such discussions occur separately from discussions about the canonical four. Moreover, the paramount principles of justice, beneficence, and respect for human beings are often reduced to the procedural matters of gaining informed consent, as we have noted above. Nixon and Sikes argue that, ‘methodology is centrally concerned with method. But method cannot be reduced to technique. Method rules, and is ruled by, the myriad adjustments, accommodations and resistances that constitute our being together’ (2003, 5).

Given these observations, we argue that the trustworthiness or rigor of a study should depend not just on whether the researcher got the technical matters right – whether about instrumentation or the protection of human subjects. Trustworthiness should also be judged by how well the researcher got the relational matters² right. We argue that these relational matters are central not only to ethical considerations but also to judgments about the overall trustworthiness of a study. Thus, in our text on qualitative research methods, Learning in the Field (Rossman and Rallis 2003), we define trustworthiness as composed of both competent practice and ethical considerations for the participants with an underlying demand that the relational matters involved in any research be fore-grounded and privileged. As Davies and Dodd note:

ethics are an essential part of rigorous research. Ethics are more than a set of principles or abstract rules that sit as an overarching entity guiding our research … Ethics exist in our actions and in our ways of doing and practicing our research; we perceive ethics to be always in progress, never to be taken for granted, flexible, and responsive to change. (2002, 281)

Ethical theories, grounded in moral principles, provide direction for researchers who seek to establish ethical relationships. Ethical theories can be grouped into two broad categories – consequentialist and non-consequentialist. The moral principles from which consequentialist ethical theories derive posit that outcomes determine the rightness or wrongness of any decision. Any particular decision is intrinsically neither good nor bad; rather, it is good or bad because of its results in a particular context – its consequences. The best-known example of a consequentialist ethical theory is utilitarianism, which would suggest that a researcher design a study that likely results in the greatest good for the greatest number. A researcher who is guided by an ethic of consequences (the basic idea underlying utilitarianism) would seek to maximize the benefits of the study to participants, policy, perhaps even society.

The other major category is non-consequentialist ethical theories. This category derives from the moral principle that universal standards exist to guide all behavior, regardless of the consequences in a specific context. Thus, if a decision or action is wrong, it must be wrong in all possible contexts. Two non-consequentialist theories on which researchers might draw are the ethic of individual rights and responsibilities and the ethic of justice. The first upholds the unconditional worth of all human beings and the equal respect to which they are entitled. This ethic judges actions by their respect for a person’s rights, not by the actions’ outcomes or consequences. From this perspective, the researcher treats each person as an end in herself, not as a means to an end. Related to the ethic of individual rights and responsibilities is the ethic of justice, which espouses principles of fairness and equity as criteria for judging the soundness of actions. Justice seeks to ensure that everyone is better off, even though the allocation of some benefit may differ. Such apparently unequal treatment is justified because not attending to the least is to hurt the whole. According to Rawls (1971), the benefit or welfare of the least advantaged, not that of the majority or average, must drive any decision. His view maintains that improving the welfare of the least advantaged ultimately benefits everyone because society and future generations will be in better shape. These non-consequentialist ethical theories are the foundation of the principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice which, as noted above, are encoded in institutional policies and procedures for the protection of human subjects.

An alternative and potentially quite powerful way to conceptualize the moral and ethical aspects of research is to think about the role of caring. Extensively explored by the philosopher of education Nel Noddings, this ethic holds that the core of morality must be the ethic of care, which:

gives only a minor place to principles and insists instead that ethical decisions must be made in caring interactions with those affected by the discussion. Indeed, it is exactly in the most difficult situations that principles fail us. Thus, instead of turning to a principle for guidance, a carer returns to the cared-for. What does he or she need? Will filling this need harm others in the network of care? (Noddings 1995, 187)

The key here is the mutual respect necessary for the caring research relationship to be possible: ‘One must meet the other in caring. From this requirement there is no escape for one who would be moral’ (Noddings 1984, 201). Thus, the ethic of caring emphasizes the moral interdependence of people – relational matters – rather than focusing on the individual as a moral agent or on mere procedures that attempt to police those relationships.

Clearly, there are no prescribed proce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Everyday ethics: reflections on practice
• 2. Assumptions, emotions, and interpretations as ethical moments: navigating a small-scale cross-cultural online interviewing study
• 3. Dangerously important moment(s) in reflexive research practices with immigrant youth
• 4. Representing representation
• 5. ‘That is NOT what’s happening at Horizon!’: ethics and misrepresenting knowledge in text
• 6. Critical incidents and reflection: turning points that challenge the researcher and create opportunities for knowing
• 7. Pedagogical ethical dilemmas in a responsive evaluation of a leadership program for youth
• 8. Subjectivity and reflexivity: locating the self in research on dislocation
• 9. Caring reflexivity
• Index