Ethics, quality and reflexivity in qualitative research Flashcards
What are the 6 key ethical considerations to make in all research?
Harm to participants Informed consent Right to refuse and right to withdraw Invasion of privacy Deception Risk and benefits to ppts
What are the 3 key ethical considerations specific to qualitative research?
Consent - What are you agreeing to?
Confidentiality - not all participants will want to be anonymous, so this will need to be discussed
Trust - Relationship between researcher and ppt; must be empathetic to draw info out of ppts, but must not exploit/misuse the trust created. Must make sure nothing puts the ppts off from participating again
What are the 4 key critiques of the traditional view of ethics?
1) Qualitative research is all about making meaning, hence cannot know all issues in advance so cannot get full and guaranteed consent from ppts.
2) Relationship with ppts differs (deception?) - trying to build trust and get them to open up, but having to keep things professional at the same time; must be careful never to mislead them into opening up so much that they regret it afterwards when they are reminded that you are first and foremost a researcher, not their friend
3) Invasion of privacy - a lot of qual. research covers sensitive issues and there needs to be a discussion in advance to make sure the ppt is definitely comfortable talking about it
4) Does disclosure of emotional experiences cause harm? - reliving a trauma, may need to make sure support is available for ppts afterwards
Essentially, “ethics in qualitative research goes beyond review boards’ requirements to involve complex issues of confidentiality, reflexivity and power”
What are the 5 vital quality considerations in qualitative research?
1) Transparency - be explicit and open about assumptions and methods used so other researchers should be able to replicate what you did and understand the context within which your data was found
2) Transferability - Can findings be transferred to other contexts
3) Sampling adequacy - thematic saturation is key i.e. collecting data until nothing new is generated
4) Reflexivity - how have you affected the research and vice versa (recognition that objectivity not always possible)
5) Inter-rater reliability - compare different people’s coding
What are the 2 considerations to make during personal reflexivity?
1) Impact of own beliefs and values - how own values, experiences, wider aims in life and social identities may have shaped the research and the analysis e.g. how did it shape questions generated for the interview
2) If research has influenced your opinions and thoughts - how has the research changed you as both a researcher and a person? Have you changed in terms of how you view the topic under study, how you view qualitative research in general etc?
What are the 3 facets of epistemological reflexivity?
1) How has the question influenced (defined and limited) what can be found out (or not)?
2) How has the data analysis stage influenced the construction of findings?
3) Could research questions be investigated differently? e.g. through the lens of another theory?
Where did the need for reflexivity in research come from?
Woolgar’s arguments that scientists don’t discover pure, cold, unarguable facts at a distance, rather they construct versions of the facts according to schemata, stereotypes, pressures, socially accepted values etc. Essentially, in constructing their accounts of the world, scientists draw on culturally available models
Why are observational studies ethically questionnable?
1) In covert participant observation, people’s private lives may be invaded without their consent
2) Some field studies carried out in the public arena involve manipulations which interfere with people’s lives e.g. street surveys delay respondents, although at least consent is sought first
Outline the ethical principle of stress avoidance
Everything possible should be done to protect ppts from mental stress and physical discomfort/harm. The difficulty is in deciding what levels of stress/discomfort are acceptable/unacceptable, and also it won’t always be possible to predict what is distressing to an individual (it will depend on personal memories triggered)
Investigators have an obligation to debrief ppts and attempt to remove even long-term negative effects of psychological research procedures; investigators should inform ppts of procedures for contacting them should stress or other harm occur after participation
Why is it not always possible to get fully informed consent?
There are many studies where telling ppts about all levels of the independent variable would render the research pointless e.g. in a study of stereotyping, for social desirability reasons
What does contextualist constructionism mean?
Researchers hold that peoples’ different perspectives create different insights into the same phenomenon i.e. there can be no ultimate check on a single validity
This also means that reliability is not relevant to evaluation of work from this perspective - we would not expect accounts of the same phenomenon to be reliably similar because individual’s constructions will be different
What are 2 forms of qualitative validity checks?
1) Respondent validation - consultation with ppts to check authenticity of researcher’s interpretations of their experiences. This is not possible/feasible in some projects e.g. in discourse analysis, this ppt point of view would simply be another construction to analyse
2) Triangulation - comparing two or more views of the same thing, comparing different perspectives. In a realist version of qual. research this would allow arrival at some form of truth (convergence) while in constructivist research the goal is completeness i.e. presenting multiple and diverse perspectives that add up to a fuller picture
