Thursday, November 24, 2011

Ethics

Research with humans is a daunting task to me. Perhaps it stems from the fact that the majority of my interests are in areas that are difficult to access (Children, race, sexuality and trama). It is also the reason that I didn't take a MA in the program I had initially wanted. I think I will draw back to my comments during ethnography and state that so much can go wrong when the researcher goes in for information and doesn't recognize impact and harm that can come from it. Currently, I do not believe that I am able to conduct a human-participant research project in a manner that I would be confident with.

From the conversation of ethics, I would like to highlight areas that I find particularly important. First and formost is the concept of setting up a research model that is not harmful. This is particularly difficult when we are asking participants to talk about trama. In that case is it better to limit harm or to follow the research to the end? If the participants signed up with the knowledge that they are going to relive (through verbal story telling) a trama, then is it okay to fully explore their feelings during the research? This can be balanced by the inclusion of of agency and the recognition that agency exists but researchers also can influence it. The tricky bit is how to negotiate the sticky place between wanting something from out participants but setting up personal boundaries and also allowing them to decide personal boundaries and comfort levels.

3 comments:

  1. I think that when dealing with tough situations such as asking participants to talk about trauma, it is best to let the participant decide their own comfort levels. The researcher must always think about what it would be like to be in their participant's shoes - is it something that they themselves would be comfortable with? We also have to remember that participants are essentially doing us a favour by agreeing to be part of our research study (Knight).

    ReplyDelete
  2. I find the discussion of ethics so interesting, because they are so deeply engrained in our own personal belief systems/ideologies/etc. One may have an ethical code for their profession, but what truly informs one's research is their own ethical code. As abovementioned, we like to create a research model that will not do harm, and will make participants comfortable, but how are we to determine what 'comfort level' to aspire to? Additionally, it seems that the stricter one's ethical code (either personal or professional), the more limited one is in performing radical research. This is by no means saying that you cannot perform useful and informative research, I am simply saying that so many areas of the human condition would be unresearchable. Consider the Milgrim studies, which informed us of what it means to experience intense human emotion. This would be considered terribly unethical, and yet, in my psychology texts it was cited as offering an extremely interesting understanding of responses under stress-- an understanding that was unattainable before this study was performed.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The protection of the privacy of research participants is an ethical principle that is borne out in the guarantee of anonymity and confidentiliaty. How does this transfer to the web environment, how closely do the principles of free and informed consent and voluntariness need to be followed when you’re talking about observing and collecting data from a web forum, twitter, etc? The ethical guidelines provided by the Universtity state, “No person shall be an ‘unwilling or unwitting’ participant in research” and demand that participation be voluntary. Yet, you can fairly argue that the web is a public space and that observing the interaction of participants of discussion on a public forum is no different to observing the way strangers behave in a public square. In cases where people free themselves fo their offline identity with a sobriquet how much privacy should they be afforded, particularly if the data can’t easily be traced back to them? It seems that they can have no reasonable expectation of privacy, so shouldn’t this lessen the obligation to obtain informed consent if not entirely then at least somewhat?

    ReplyDelete