Identify the major ethical challenges faced by qualitative researchers and discuss one qualitative research project that posed particular ethical concerns.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Qualitative research can raise some complex ethical issues. No matter how hard the field researcher strives to study the social world naturally, leaving no traces, the very act of research itself imposes something unnatural on the situation. It is up to the researchers to identify and take responsibility for the consequences of their involvement. Several ethical issues arise: voluntary participation, subject well-being, identity disclosure, confidentiality, establishing boundaries, and maintaining the safety of researchers in the field.
Voluntary Participation: Ensuring that subjects are participating in a study voluntarily is not often a problem with intensive interviewing and focus group research, but it is often a point of contention in participant observation studies. Few researchers or IRBs are willing to condone covert participation because it does not offer a way to ensure that participation by the subjects is voluntary. Even when the researcher’s role is more open, interpreting the standard of voluntary participation still can be difficult. Most field research would be impossible if the participant observer were required to request permission of everyone having some contact, no matter how minimal, with a group or setting being observed. For instance, should the requirement of voluntary participation apply equally to every member of an organization being observed? What if the manager consents, the workers are ambivalent, and the union says no? Requiring everyone’s consent would limit participant observation research only to settings without serious conflicts of interest.
The issue of voluntary participation is particularly important when interviewing or observing minors. At what age can individuals validly give their voluntary consent to participate in a project? It is customary for human subjects committees to want the consent of parents when their children are participating in research. This requirement poses a problem for research that may be investigating issues that parents or guardians may not want uncovered, such as abuse or neglect. In other instances, alerting parents or guardians about the nature of the study may compromise the confidentiality of the participants. For example, if Decker and Van Winkle (1996) had been forced to obtain parental approval for their gang member interviews, it would have violated the confidentiality they tried to provide to their respondents. To assure the human subjects committee that their participants understood their rights, Decker and Van Winkle obtained an advocate for each juvenile member of their sample. This advocate was responsible for making sure that the juveniles each understood his or her right to refuse or quit the interview at any time without penalty and the confidential nature of the project. Only after these issues were carefully explained did the participant sign a consent form. As noted in Chapter 3, issues of true voluntary participation also arise with other populations such as patients or inmates in a correctional facility.
Subject Well-Being: Before beginning a project, every field researcher should carefully consider how to avoid harm to subjects. It is not possible to avoid every theoretical possibility of harm or to be sure that any project will not cause adverse consequences to any individual. Direct harm to the reputations or feelings of particular individuals is what researchers must carefully avoid. They can do so in part by maintaining the confidentiality of research subjects. They must also avoid adversely affecting the course of events while engaged in a setting.
Jody Miller (2000) encountered a unique ethical dilemma while she was recruiting young women from a residential facility by paying them to refer other girls who were gang members to her research. These referral gratuities are common in snowball samples such as this. Unfortunately, in this case one young woman decided to cash in on the deal by initiating new young women into her gang. Here, the ethical dilemma regarding “subject well-being” was that the initiation ceremony for this particular gang involved recruits to the gang being “beaten into the gang.” Miller decided to stop conducting research at this location and ultimately lost several interviews. She states,
It was a difficult decision to make because I had struggled for so long to locate gang girls in Columbus [Missouri]. Ultimately, I believe it was the right thing to do. My presence had stirred up trouble for the agency, and I had an ethical obligation to back away, regardless of the cost to me.
Identity Disclosure: How much disclosure about the study is necessary, and how hard should researchers try to make sure that their research purposes are understood? Less-educated subjects may not readily comprehend what a researcher does or be able to weigh the possible consequences of the research for themselves. Should researchers inform subjects if the study’s interests and foci change while it is in progress? Current ethical standards require informed consent of research subjects. Can this standard be met in any meaningful way if researchers do not fully disclose their identity in the first place? But isn’t some degree of deception a natural part of social life (Punch, 1994)? Can a balance be struck between the disclosure of critical facts and a coherent research strategy?
Confidentiality: Field researchers normally use fictitious names for the people in their reports, but doing so does not always guarantee confidentiality for their research subjects. Individuals in the setting studied may be able to identify those whose actions are described and may thus become privy to some knowledge about their colleagues or neighbors that would otherwise have been kept from them. Researchers should therefore make every effort to expunge possible identifying material from published information and to alter unimportant aspects of a description when necessary to prevent identity disclosure. In any case, no field research project should begin if it is clear that some participants will suffer serious harm by being identified in project publications.
Confidentiality is particularly important if the research is uncovering deviant or illegal behavior. In Rios’s research in Oakland, it was almost inevitable that he would witness illegal activity and/or be told about past criminal behavior. However, he told the boys he was not there to study their criminality. He stated,
This could put them in danger if the records would ever end up with the police. Inevitably I would witness and hear a plethora of stories about crime. Later I would find myself reminding the young men not to provide me with details about the crimes that they had committed.
As we discussed in Chapter 3, researchers are not generally compelled to report past offending behavior to authorities unless information is reported that indicates a research subject intends to harm himself/herself or others in the future.
Appropriate Boundaries: This is an ethical issue that cuts across several of the others, including identity disclosure, subject well-being, and voluntary participation. You probably are familiar with this issue in the context of guidelines for professional practice: Therapists are cautioned to maintain appropriate boundaries with patients; teachers must maintain appropriate boundaries with students. This is a special issue in qualitative research because it often involves loosening the boundary between the researcher and the research subject. Qualitative researchers may seek to build rapport with those they plan to interview by expressing an interest in their concerns and conveying empathy for their situation. Is this just faking friendship for the purpose of the research? Jean Duncombe and Julie Jessop (2002) posed the dilemma clearly in a book chapter titled “‘Doing Rapport’ and the Ethics of ‘Faking Friendship.’”
With deeper rapport, interviewees become more likely to explore their more intimate experiences and emotions. Yet they also become more likely to discover and disclose experiences and feelings which, upon reflection, they would have preferred to keep private from others... or not to acknowledge even to themselves.
Researcher Safety: Research in the field, whether researchers are studying gang life or anything else, should not begin until any potential risks to researcher safety have been evaluated. Qualitative methods may provide the only opportunity to learn about organized crime in Russian ports (Belousov et al., 2007), street crime in the Dominican Republic (Gill, 2004), or the other topics examined by studies in this chapter, but they should not be used if the risks to the researchers are unacceptably high. Safety needs to be considered at the time of designing the research, not as an afterthought upon arriving at the research site. As Hannah Gill learned in the Dominican Republic, such advance planning can require more investigation than just reading the local newspapers: “Due to the community’s marginality, most crimes, including murders, were never reported in newspapers, making it impossible to have known the insecurity of the field site ahead of time” (p. 2).
Being realistic about evaluating risk does not mean simply accepting misleading assumptions about unfamiliar situations or communities. For example, reports of a widespread breakdown in law and order in New Orleans were broadcast repeatedly after Hurricane Katrina, but researchers found that most nontraditional behavior in that period was actually prosocial rather than antisocial (Rodríguez, Trainor, & Quarantelli, 2006):
One group named itself the “Robin Hood Looters.” The core of this group consisted of eleven friends who, after getting their own families out of the area, decided to remain at some high ground and, after the floodwaters rose, commandeered boats and started to rescue their neighbors.... For about two weeks they kept searching in the area.... They foraged for food and water from abandoned homes, and hence [acquired] their group name. Among the important norms that developed were that they were going to retrieve only survivors and not bodies and that group members would not carry weapons. The group also developed informal understandings with the police and the National Guard.