Ethics in research

Ross Woods, Rev. 2018

These ethical principles were first written for ethnographers working in restricted environments, and most of them are more widely applicable. However, most disciplines have their own ethical standards, often because they face particular challenges.

1. Be respectful of persons, their culture, and their institutions.

As an underlying principle, you are required to treat people as valuable and worthy of trust. This brings up issues of your personal ethnocentricity and prejudices, potential favouritism toward some individuals, and your bias toward some viewpoints.

Clearly, you do not need to agree with everything that people say and do, and you could be exposed to practices that may be seen as grossly immoral. Nevertheless, your starting point is your respect toward them.

2. Get people's permission if they are to be your informants.

In some ethical codes, you are legally required fully explain any risks and to get subjects' written approval.

Ethnography is quite different; it is enough to ask orally. Anything more formal might make them suspicious or act unnaturally and result in invalid data. For example, I'm new here and I'm learning your culture. I don't understand some things. Could you help me please? (Of course you'd adapt the example to your situation.) Then, as much as possible, keep interviews to friendly conversations and make notes immediately afterwards, not during the conversation. Technically these are called free informal interviews.

Some interviewees give permission to be quoted with their names, especially on matters that are not sensitive and perhaps enhance their prestige. You can reference them fully as formal interviews.

In some countries, privacy laws require you to obtain the written consent of informants, but the general trend this that this does not apply to free informal interviews if you keep specific identities confidential.

Some topics become impractical if laws require you to disclose fully the nature of the research project for getting informants' or subjects' permission. In many cases, providing that information is just unscientific, because it predisposes people toward particular responses, making your conclusions invalid.

3. Protect the interests of your research subjects.

First, avoid any way in which informants' cooperation and personal information could be used against them. In some cases, people can be arrested and imprisoned based on your information. For example, Spradley's ethnography of the homeless in the US could have been used to arrest many of his informants had it been published locally. Your research could lead you to knowledge of illegal activities. Your commitment to your informants generally means that you should prefer to protect their interests. In some cases, you might even need to "pull the plug" on your research to protect a victim. Besides, simply by being present and observing an illegal act may lead you to be deemed to be an accomplice. The danger is even greater in countries with oppressive regimes or persecution policies.

Protecting your research subjects includes various ways of keeping informantation private:

  1. Keep people’s identities and personal information private and confidential unless they have explicitly authorized otherwise. This is also a legal requirement under privacy laws.
  2. Unless informants have explicitly agreed otherwise, you should keep informant's quotes anonymous in the final work, and maintain the integrity of the informants' information by keeping it distinct from your analysis and comments. You can simply add a note in your introduction that informants are not identified for privacy and security reasons. The same applies to organizations; if the activities of an organization are not on public record in the location of their activities, you should not mention them by name except in in-house written work. Some organizations need to operate out of the public eye, and being mentioned in a public document may endanger their personnel or their activities. Use your fieldnotes for accountability with your supervisor.
    It is generally better simply to add a note in your introduction that informants are not identified for ethical reasons. You might find pseudonyms helpful. However, you should record identities (as much as you know), places, and times of interviews in your field notes. These records are helpful when you need to establish the authenticity of your field information with your supervisor, but these records must then be handled according to security procedures.
  3. Readers should not be able to identify your informants from the way you have written about them. Informants might also validly perceive audio or video recordings to be a risk. "What if someone recognizes my voice? Or sees my face?"
  4. You will often use a networked sample (a natural network of friends, relatives, and neighbors), that will make your work more secure. You are introduced to people by others whom they trust.
  5. Some of your research may need to be private, so keep and transmit documents the same as any other material that you wish to keep private (e.g. hand-carried or secure Internet connection).
  6. It is sometimes to your advantage that cultural descriptions be made public in edited form. They are usually not security risks if you see a culture emically and sympathetically. Your people can easily tend to see descriptions as a reflection of their ethnic pride, so an an attack on your work is an ethnic attack on them. Besides, if your work is on public record, you can easily provide evidence that your activities are not a security risk. However, making edited versions available might not be advisable when the ethnic group you study is an oppressed minority or if you should have a research permit as part of your visa.

4. Avoid the appearance of exploitation and deception.

Your research, including your relationships with informants and any means used to acquire information, may not be exploitative, or seen to be so. Besides the obvious problems of inappropriate relationships (e.g. romantic entanglements), your information gathering gives you the ability to become power-broker or mediator, which is a potentially exploitive position. You also have a duty to protect them from exploitation.

You may not use deceptive means to obtain information. While it is normal to select information that you should disclose, you may not provide misinformation.

5. Keep everyone safe.

Maintain a safe environment for yourself and others. This is rather obvious with the current emphasis on workplace safety and the aversion to risk.

6. Your information must accurately reflect your sources.

Your reporting needs to be honest and representative of what you have observed, read, and heard. You need to protect the intellectual property of authors, informants, colleagues and research assistants. The list of prohibitions is more illustrative of the kinds of potential problems: