ABSTRACT
Schon’s (1987) metaphorical distinction between the high ground of research versus the swamplands of practice has evidenced considerable heuristic utility. When looking at the practice of research itself, however, the clarity of the high ground rapidly blurs into the messiness of the swamplands. Ironically, the swamplands are nowhere more obvious than when the focus is on research ethics. Recognition of ethical risk in social science research is not new, and research texts are
replete with guidelines on ethics; this chapter does not attempt to add to that literature. Indeed, the chapter may raise more questions than recommend solutions. Using excerpts from interviews with five higher education development researchers, I consider five often unthought-of ethical challenges that emerged from their reflections on their experiences. These challenges involve the problematic nature of anonymity and confidentiality, representation, role conflict and the risk of instrumentalism. Such challenges, I suggest, originate from the essence of social science research in general, and qualitative social science research in particular. Qualitative research sui generis invokes ethical complexity as it ‘probes the very personal,
subjective truths of people’s lives’, which in turn exposes ‘our own frailties, concerns, and questions as interpretive researchers’ (Clark and Sharf 2007: 399). Added to which, research is not only about something or someone, but for someone, and this renders it morally vulnerable. Current pressures to increase research outputs may serve to emphasise this dimension of the instrumentality of academic research (Payne 2000). Well-meant advice ‘to proceed ethically and without threatening the validity of the research
endeavour in so far as it is possible to do so’ provides no talisman against ethical dilemmas (Cohen et al. 2000: 49). Advice to resort to criteria for well-designed research methodology also fails to offer
protection from ethical complexity – indeed such design may well cloak unintended ethical risk (Ramcharan and Cutcliffe 2001). Not far beneath the surface of such advice lies a reef of instrumentalist risk-benefit ethics. Even reversion to ethical codes offers cold comfort, serving to surface the ethical impasse of the imposition of the general onto the particular. It may well be that, as Homan (1991) suggests, the apparent conflation of ethics with codes of conduct may serve to imperil the very values such codes were intended to protect. Codes provide principles, but principles rest on moral bases and require moral judgement to apply in the particular circumstances of each research event (Pring 2000). Moral judgement brings educational researchers face to face with the character, the ‘moral virtues’ (Pring 2001: 418), the ‘disposition to act appropriately in a particular situation’ (Pring 2000: 143, italics original) of the researcher. In reflecting on the responses of colleagues whose research practice I have chosen
(perhaps expediently) to surface, I am confronted with the very concerns about which I write. For example, my research project referred to in this chapter arose originally out of a question posed during a faculty research ethics week: How do faculty-based researchers experience ethical dilemmas in their research? As a member of the faculty research ethics committee, I justified the research on the long-established principle of the ‘right to know’. Pring (2000) argues that such a right is conditional on, for example, at least three other principles: the right to respect held by research subjects; commitments to confidentiality; the provisional nature of truth claims. My research project has resulted in a conference paper, a faculty seminar, a journal article and a book chapter. These ‘outcomes’ pose uncomfortable questions: What is the relationship between means and ends? Who was this research ‘for’, at whose expense, and what right had I to undertake it and publish the results – irrespective of ‘informed consent’ and ‘ethics permission’? As one of the HED practitioner project respondents remarked with respect to his research: ‘the ethical issues are very large, and … even though … [his] … project … has reached a kind of an end point, the consequences … continue all the time’ (Respondent 1, senior lecturer). This going beyond ethical codes and admitting the moral into consideration of research ethics leads to potential impasse: ‘[I]n beginning to spell out the virtues, I came to recognise my own vices. But that is why I am not a researcher. But perhaps many others should not be either’ (Pring 2001: 421). In order to further interrogate the business as unusual nature of ethical challenges
emergent from qualitative research, what follows offers a brief discussion of the usage of ‘ethics’ in research literature. I then consider the application of two particular lenses not traditionally found in research ethics literature to an exploration of the ways in which the five HED practitioners reflected on their experience of researching in their own backyards. The two lenses are those of:
the understanding of aporia attributed to Heidegger (1945), and evetts (2003: 400) usage of ‘guilty knowledge’ as part of the professional burden.
The inclusion of the HED researchers’ experience is more than illustrative. It is through the qualitative examination of the mundane practices of academics that we can better understand the impact of policy (such as research assessment policies and ethical codes) on practice (Clegg 2005).
