Childhood is a foreign country? Ethics in socio-spatial childhood research as a question of ‘how’ and ‘what’

This chapter presents an overview of these proposals and of the problems they address. Research ethics are increasingly important for scientists who want to act with integrity in their role as researchers. Research ethics can be distinguished from scientific ethics: While research ethics focus on the relationship between researchers and participants in empirical research, the ethics of science deals with the rules of good scientific practice. In a large survey among scientists from different academic fields in the United States, Martinson and his colleagues discovered that a large number of researchers face ethical dilemmas and behave according to ethical scientific standards. In 2017, geographers working at universities and research institutes in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland were invited to participate in an online survey1 about their attitudes towards and experiences with ethics in their empirical research. The chapter discusses the indicated that ethical questions in human and physical geography often emerge at different stages of the research process.