Ethical considerations in a ethnographic research

1. Levels of ethical considerations relevant for research

There are three levels on which ethical considerations bear on the conduct of research:

• The official, published standards are those mandated by the government. They are operative in most universities and other research institutions.
• Codes of ethics are those promulgated by professional societies to which researchers belong. For example, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) states that In both proposing and carrying out our research, anthropological researchers must be open about the purpose(s), potential impacts, and source(s) of support for research projects with funders, colleagues, per­sons studied or providing information, and with relevant parties affected by the research. Researchers must expect to utilize the results of their work in an appropriate fashion and disseminate the results through appropriate and timely activities. Research fulfilling these expectations is ethical, regardless of the source of funding (public or private) or pur­pose (i.e., ‘applied’, ‘basic’, or ‘proprietary’).

The AAA goes on to stipulate that the primary responsibility of researchers is to the people with whom they work and whose lives and cultures they study; responsibili­ties to scholarship and the scientific community and to the general public, while important, are secondary to that relationship to the people who provide the sub­stance of the research (see Rynkiewich and Spradley, 1981).

• Our own personal values guide us as we attempt to deal fairly and humanely with other people. Personal values may be the product of our religious tradi­tions, the consensus among our peer groups, our own personal reflection on issues of concern, or some combination of all these factors. (See Elliott and Stern, 1997, for a fuller discussion of research ethics.)

2. Institutional structures

Social research is governed by the structure of institutional review boards (IRBs; see also Flick, 2007b, chap. 9), which since the 1960s have grown out of federal regulations mandating informed consent from all those participating in federally funded research. Those participants are, in the regulatory language, referred to as human subjects.

The protection of ‘human subjects’ became an issue as a result of a number of research projects in which experiments (usually of a biomedical or otherwise clinical nature) led to the injury or even death of participants. In order to save subjects from the negative effects of ‘intrusive’ research procedures, participa­tion in the research was made a choice that was under the control of the poten­tial subjects. And in order for them to make a well-reasoned choice, they would have to be informed beforehand about the nature of the project and what, exactly, their participation would entail.

Protecting human research subjects refers not only to saving them from phys­ical or psychological injury. It also refers to safeguarding their privacy and main­taining the confidentiality of all research records that might identify them. Since we cannot always assume we know what potential research subjects do or do not consider matters of privacy that they do not wish anyone outside the research context to know about, we must be very careful in spelling out for them the ways

we will keep information from getting out. And we must learn to listen to them when they tell us what is and is not acceptable to them personally or collectively on behalf of their community.

One common procedure is to use codes (numbers or pseudonyms) when describing people in field notes and in any reports generated from the research. The researcher might also want to specify that the notes will be kept in a secure place or that they will be destroyed upon completion of the project. Copies of research records (e.g. tapes and/or transcripts of interviews) could be returned to the subject for approval prior to the publication of any product based on those records.

But unlike members of the clergy, or physicians, or lawyers, ethnographers do not enjoy an automatic privilege of confidentiality. If push comes to shove, our promises to our subjects cannot withstand a court subpoena. Like reporters pro­tecting their sources, we can always opt to refuse to comply with such a subpoena and pay the consequences for that refusal. But not everyone is prepared to follow that high moral ground to its logical conclusions.

The enunciation of a right of informed consent led to the creation of IRBs set up to monitor and enforce compliance at all institutions receiving federal mon­eys. No researcher would seriously argue against that right (or mechanisms to support it), but social scientists have been increasingly concerned about the ten­dency of IRBs to extend their reach over all forms of research. While the research of social scientists is certainly less likely than biomedical research to have dire physical consequences, it certainly has the potential to harm subjects who have not been properly informed. But in the view of many social scientists, IRBs have been slow to recognize the nuances of difference between ‘intrusive’ research of the clinical/biomedical sort and of the ethnographic sort.

In the 1980s, the federal government allowed social scientists to claim an exemption from review unless they were working with members of designated vulnerable populations, including children, people with disabilities, people in prison, and the elderly. Since such people are, for various reasons, less likely to understand the procedures and aims of social research, they are more likely not to make a truly informed decision to participate unless extra caution is exercised. In any case, legal counselors at a number of universities (including the one at which this author is based) have advised against IRBs granting this near-blanket exemption. Indeed, at my university, all proposals must be reviewed by the IRB, even those that meet the federal criteria for exemption, although they may be deemed eligible for an ‘expedited’ review. Even proposals that would seem to be unarguably exempt (e.g. studies relying on on-the-record interviews with elected officials about matters of public policy) must still be filed with the IRB. It is ironic that another type of exempt research – that relying on ‘unobtrusive’ meas­ures, as discussed in an earlier chapter – is the very one about which ethnographic researchers themselves have the most ethical concerns, because the people under study are not supposed to be informed at all that research is going on.

My university now has two IRBs, one for biomedical research and one for ‘behavioral research’. The latter, however, is staffed by researchers more familiar with experimental forms of social research than with participant-observer-based ethnography, and they are still not entirely sensitive to the ways in which ethno­graphic fieldworkers operate. For example, experimental researchers work from strict research protocols, with all questions spelled out in advance and all obser­vational procedures highly structured. While ethnographers may well use similar methods in the field, they also use many methods that cannot be completely explicated beforehand. Things that happen in the course of participant observa­tion cannot always be clearly anticipated, and informal, off-the-cuff interviews are just as common as highly structured ones. These contingencies make it very difficult for ethnographers to produce the sort of research proposal that satisfies the IRBs’ understandable desire to have all the possible areas of concern clearly delineated and reviewed before research is authorized.

As a result, even the ‘behavioral’ research IRB requires a statement of a hypothesis to be tested and a ‘protocol for the experiment’. Moreover, of the many hundreds of pages in the federal handbook for IRBs, only eleven paragraphs are devoted to behavioral research. It is now mandated that all principal investi­gators on IRB-reviewed projects take continuing education on evolving federal ethical standards. It is possible to do so over the Internet, but in the most recent academic year, the choices of training modules were all drawn from the area of health services research. (See Fluehr-Lobban, 2003, for a fuller discussion of ethics and the function of an IRB and also Flick, 2007b, chap. 9)

In a rather surprising recent twist, the Oral History Association has agreed to define what its members do as ‘not research’ so that they will not have to deal with the IRB at all. Their reasoning is that ‘research’ is based on experimental design, hypothesis testing, and quantitative analysis. Therefore, oral history (and, by impli­cation, the great bulk of ethnographic research) is not research, but something more akin to what is done in literature and the arts. Ethnographers do not by any means shun affiliation with literature and the arts, but most would reject the notion that what they do is therefore not research. This issue has not been satisfactorily resolved as of this writing. For the time being, then, it is important for all those contemplating ethnographic research to familiarize themselves with the current institutional ethical standards on the assumption that their projects might be entitled to ‘expedited’ review but are not – and should not be – ‘exempt’ from review.

3. The personal dimension of research ethics

Even if an ethnographic researcher has carefully followed the appropriate insti­tutional guidelines for ethical conduct, there are still several situations peculiar to ethnography (particularly that based on participant observation) that raise ethical challenges for the fieldworker.

We must, for example, consider the label now enshrined in federal policy: human subjects. The term certainly has clinical and impersonal connotations that are inappropriate to ethnography in general. It also has certain political connota­tions, reflecting a hierarchical view of the research process. It may once have been the case that the researcher was in control and was in a position to manipulate all the elements in the research design to suit his or her purpose. To a certain extent, this may still be true in the experimental sciences, but it was usually not true of ethnography, and it has become much less true in our own time. Ethnographers are increasingly inclined to think of the people they study as research ‘partners’ or ‘collaborators’ rather than as ‘subjects’.

Participant observers after all develop their research as they go along. It grows out of the evolving relationship that they cultivate with the people in the study community. In a very important sense, the ethnographic research process is a dia­logue between the researcher and the community. While the researcher may have the skills to carry out the data collection and analysis, he or she is almost com­pletely dependent on the cooperation and goodwill of those being studied in order to accomplish that process. Their ‘informed consent’ must necessarily mean more than that they simply understand what the researcher wants to do ‘to’ them; they must understand how their own feedback will become part of the plan of what the researcher can do ‘with’ them.

The research landscape created by the emergence of IRBs heightens the chal­lenge that has always faced ethnographic fieldworkers, namely:

How do you strike an appropriate balance between the intense inter­actions that are an integral part of the participant observational strat­egy and the need to maintain some degree of scholarly objectivity so as to be able to present a balanced and persuasive analysis of the com­munity under study?

There is no simple or uniform answer to that question, which is basically a mat­ter of context and situation.

For example, in Trinidad I lived in a family’s home and was treated as part of that family unit. My identification with a respected family in the community gave me entree into the homes and workplaces of others. But it was always very clear that I was not an Indian, not a Trinidadian and, vis-a-vis the AA group, not an alcoholic. I was clearly an outsider in terms of race, ethnicity, educational back­ground, religion, and so forth. I was a sympathetic outsider to be sure, one who was able to establish a warm working relationship with people in the community. But my status as one whose main purpose was to ‘write a book’ (which is how they understood my scholarly purposes) was never questioned, nor was my need to keep a certain distance so as to see the ‘big picture’.

In formal terms, I was no less an outsider to the community of adults with men­tal retardation, but the men in that group were not always able to distinguish me in my capacity as friend from me in my capacity as someone studying their lives. I could not keep the distance that was recognized and respected in Trinidad with regard to the men in the agency. One of the main reasons, in fact, that I opted to write my book about this project in the form of a fictionalized narrative was because I could not assume the mantle of detached scholarly objectivity that would have been expected in a standard monograph, but that would have been a falsification of the degree to which my friendship with these men had shaped both my analysis and my way of seeing the world in which they lived.

These considerations make it more, rather than less, imperative that ethnogra­phers be mindful of the relational ethics implied by the informed consent process. But human interactions are always situated in some context; it is difficult to squeeze them into universally applicable, objective ‘codes’ (see Punch, 1986).

4. Conclusion

An important part of the toolkit of all well-trained ethnographic fieldworkers should be their ability to clearly understand their own values as they bear on respect for others, and to articulate those values in such a way that potential research ‘collaborators’ can in fact make a reasonably well-informed decision about whether or not they want to participate in a given project.

Source: Angrosino Michael (2008), Doing Ethnographic and Observational Research, SAGE Publications Ltd; 1st edition.