ABSTRACT
This book had two goals. First, by allowing researchers at various stages of their academic careers to tell their stories of how they addressed big ethical moments in the field, usually with little ongoing assistance from ethics committees, the prevalence of these predicaments was routinized. The other goal was routinizing the partial. It set out to treat the problems that qualitative researchers have with ethics committees not as a moral panic (van den Hoonaard, 2001) or entangled by ethics creep (Haggerty, 2004) but instead as a routine and unavoidable occurrence. Formal ethics review for qualitative research is at best partial: neither ethics committees nor qualitative researchers can predict the big ethical moments that will develop in the field. Thus, the ethics applications researchers write and the ethics committees review are generalized guesses with regard to ethics in practice. This uncertainty stems from an epistemological problem aligning qualitative research with ethics review, like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. If there is a crisis in qualitative research ethics review, it is not solely the ethics committee’s problem; ethics committees and qualitative researchers alike share the responsibility, as only some of the burden of qualitative research ethics is manifest in procedural ethics, as most emerge in the field as ethics in practice. This book documents this.
