ABSTRACT
This book has a different starting point from others that concentrate on qualitative research ethics; it focuses on how qualitative researchers experience ethical dilemmas in the field and how they resolve them, not on how ethics committees review qualitative research. Moral panic (Hoonaard, 2001; Fitzgerald, 2005), ethics creep (Haggerty, 2004), travelers and trolls (Pritchard, 2002) are common accounts social scientists have used to characterize their uneasy relationship with ethics committees (Institutional Review Boards in the USA, Research Ethics Boards in Canada, Human Research Ethics Committees in Australia, and Research Ethics Committees in the UK). Israel and Hay (2006, p. 1) story the relationship as one where “social scientists are angry and frustrated, their work is being constrained and distorted by regulators of ethical practice who do not necessarily understand social science research.” Although mindful of these critiques, my position on these questions has focused less on outward critiques and more on the ethical considerations of qualitative research itself. Additionally, for most of the past fifteen years I have served on ethics committees, mostly as chairperson, and recently I worked to establish a not-for-profit company operating a noninstitutional ethics committee. The New Zealand Ethics Committee reviews applications gratis from researchers in local and central government and NGOs along with community researchers who are routinely disenfranchised from formal ethical review. Ethics committees play an important role in protecting participants from harm, yet their ability to evaluate qualitative research is incomplete. Obscured from ethics committees and researchers alike are the ethical events that unfold in the field.
