ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that any good story involves adversity and challenge, offering the protagonist the opportunity to overcome suffering and demonstrate courage, resilience, humour or whatever other human virtue leads to overcoming the challenge. It explores the experiences of using digital stories to inform research data collection in the context of healthcare and healthcare education. The chapter explores issues around veracity and reliability, the concept of power and consent. It examines how these ethical issues have an added dimension within the digital storytelling format. Digital storytelling is part of a worldwide movement towards social justice, personal empowerment and personal and collective emancipation. In conclusion, the key ethical issues that arise when working with digital storytellers are informed by the fact that the stories can be viewed as units of raw data that await analysis by the research team but also as discrete, auto-ethnographic, auto-analysed data packets contributed by the storytellers.
