ABSTRACT
Commitments to developing disciplines and professions often lead protagonists to overstate the extent to which a special case should and can be made for the distinctives of that field. Research practice and ethics are no exception. In falling foul of this trap, the gains from shared common ground may be lost.1 However, valuable work has been accomplished on developing an understanding of research ethics in social work (eg Butler, 2002) – valuable in part because it provides a community reference point. One drawback of such texts is that they leave the twin impressions that applying ethics to social work research works in a fairly standard way from one project to another, and that such applications are largely initial business, sorted and settled in the early phases of the research.
