Turning Ideas into Research. Barbara Fawcett
United Nations has also located ethical research practice as a human rights issue. Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights says:
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. In particular, no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation. (United Nations High Commission for Human Rights, 1966)
The history of these developments is mirrored in most countries in the Western world. Dodd and Epstein (2012) chronicle developments in the USA commencing with the Nuremberg trials in 1945, and several subsequent studies that were ‘sentinel’ in their failure to observe agreed ethical research principles, including human rights abuses, breaches of confidentiality and the absence of participant consent. Several of these studies have been well documented in the ethics literature, such as Milgram’s Obedience Study published in 1974, the Humphrey tearoom trade study published in 1970 and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study protocol revealed in 1972 but begun in 1932 (discussed in Habibis, 2010; Dodd and Epstein, 2012).
Looking at two of these studies to illustrate these failures, the Humphrey tearoom trade study was a covert, ethnographic study of casual homosexual encounters in which the researcher actively participated as a lookout for participants. The researcher noted car registration numbers and about a year later contacted these individuals to interview them about their socioeconomic position. In a review of the study, Habibis (2010: 95) states: ‘Humphrey’s study challenged negative stereotypes about gay men and so made an important contribution to the destigmatisation of homosexuality. However its violation of fundamental ethical principles, such as informed consent, compromised its validity within the academic community’.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was conducted over 40 years (ending in the 1970s) and involved African-American men infected with syphilis. This study did not involve fully informed consent and, although providing some access to free medical care, failed to inform participants of their disease and failed to provide full medical treatment. These examples involved research with participants who were in unequal and powerless relationships with the researchers and who were from vulnerable groups, neither recognized nor acknowledged, at the time the studies were undertaken. The development and implementation of more stringent ethical research codes of practice that formally prescribed the researcher–participant relationship was a means of addressing the exploitation and abuse of well-intentioned research that impinged on and ignored both human rights and the observance of key ethical principles.
This is not to say, however, that a reasoned approach to ethical decision-making in research prior to the emergence of these codes was not possible. For example, if we consider a principles-based approach to ethics founded on principles that are considered to be deeply ingrained in everyday thinking and life, there has always been a means of reasoning out an ethical course of action. Given this perspective, we will now turn to consider some contemporary debates regarding ethics and research.
Ethics, research and inclusivity
In returning to the concept of the relationship between ethics and moral decision-making, Hershock (2000) states that ethics is an expression of morality and can be understood in terms of the ways in which social relationships are envisioned at a given point in time. This has significant currency within the critiques of postmodernist thinking as morality is discursively constructed (Hugman, 2005; Ife, 2008). In speaking specifically about professional practice but making a point that is also relevant for researchers, Hugman (2005: 138) says that ‘discursive ethics is the conduct of a dialogue about that which is good (values) and that which is right (actions) … in which all those who are affected can participate’. This emphasis on participation is picked up further by Ife (2008). Although research ethics has been located within a human rights discourse, in critiquing this discourse, Ife argues that it is dominated by the voices of the privileged; a discourse ‘of the powerful’ such as academics, lawyers, politicians, religious leaders and so on about ‘the powerless’ (p. 136), that has resulted in well-intentioned but dichotomous positions. The dilemma is clear. Not locating disadvantage and powerlessness in this domain results in the exclusion and denial of human rights. However, the desired outcome, that of rebalancing privileged world-views, can only be achieved by full and equal participatory relationships. Extending these arguments further to the research domain, we can begin to see that codified ethical processes may perpetuate dichotomous positioning of the researcher and those being researched, even with the best of intentions.
The emergence of new and different research approaches has challenged the exclusivity of earlier research paradigms. These approaches have been iterative in their evolution and represent a repositioning of social research in equal partnership with research from the physical world. For the purpose of considering ethical issues, and although by no means fully representative of all types of research, the following discussion locates these as three waves of change occurring from the early 1970s to the present.
The first wave of change can be attributed to the emergence of qualitative methodologies in the 1970s that challenged not only the criteria used to evaluate the credibility of the research but also the fundamental ontological position regarding the nature of reality and the relationships between the researcher and knowledge. As qualitative methods found both a voice and synergy in the multiple truths and realities of the postmodernist era, the naturalistic paradigm became the frame of a broad field known as social research. Definitions of social research usually include reference to a systematic process or method of collecting information for the purpose of finding patterns or trends or new ways of understanding social phenomena or relationships. These understandings can lead to new ways of interpreting situations, meaning-making and actions; see, for example, Alston and Bowles (2012: 6) and Marshall and Rossman (1995: 15).
A second wave of change began to reflect the diversity and difference in social relationships that could be attributed to relationships of power. Emancipatory research became the means through which the powerless or disempowered could be privileged in the research endeavour not only as participants being researched but in the open acknowledgement and articulation of previously silent or taken-for-granted assumptions about situations and phenomena that were systematically discriminatory. Contemporary feminist researching can be located in this second wave. In both these research approaches, a variety of theoretical perspectives may inform the research design and interpretation of findings.
The most recent wave of change is the emergence of differing ‘ways of knowing’, which are particularly relevant in the field of Indigenous researching and also in disability researching. As part of emancipatory perspectives, these approaches challenge entrenched and systemic discrimination in the theory, design and implementation of research. Of significance to ethical considerations in these contemporary movements is the epistemological position of the researcher. In exploring changing ideas, Howell (2013), drawing on the earlier work of Guba and Lincoln (2000) and Heron and Reason (1997), examines various paradigms of inquiry and presents new commentary on this position. Unlike the accepted relationships that exist in scientifically orientated forms of positivist research, in constructivist and participatory methods a subjective relationship is developed between the researcher and participants. Findings are subjective, iterative and meanings understood in an interactive, inductive relationship that is not separate but a joined-up activity. This was briefly touched on in Chapter 2 when we began to explore the relationships between the researcher and knowledge.
In an example of the ethical tensions that these positions create, Morley (2011) has documented her experiences as a researcher using critical reflection as a research methodology. In a study exploring self-perceptions of failure in practice by sexual assault counsellors and advocates, critical reflection models developed by Fook (2002) and Fook and Gardner (2007) were used to explore dominant assumptions and discourses that implicitly disempowered individual workers in this field of practice. In a role that challenged the usual objective ethical positioning of the researcher, Morley was an active participant in the dialogue with research participants that led to a transformational view of the work being undertaken, actively challenging the assumptions of the workers in their descriptions of practice and experience. This position was supported by rigorous critical reflection, reflexivity and researcher supervision