Dvora Yanow and Severine van Bommel: Dilemmas in Fieldwork and Research Ethics

Such review is implemented by committees operating under various names (e.g., Institutional Review Boards/US, Human Research Ethics Committees/Australia) on university campuses, in hospitals, and in other settings; other states around the world, including China and India, are themselves adopting ethics review practices. These policies apply not only to experimental research in medical fields and psychology, but also to other research designs across the social sciences; it is becoming increasingly difficult to conduct research without obtaining such approvals.  Indeed, journals are increasingly requiring ‘ethics approval’ evidence along with submitted manuscripts. This is leading to a renewed interest in research ethics.

'Ethics' is a proper field of philosophical inquiry and theorizing, and philosophy’s systematic ways of thinking can be helpful in thinking through the implications of one’s actions. At the same time, little is known, systematically, about the character of the ethical challenges facing researchers doing fieldwork—an interview-based project, some form of participant-observation/ ethnography, action research. The purpose of this workshop is to bring such researchers together to discuss some of the ethical challenges they/we have faced. We intend the session, in other words, to be grounded in actual research experiences - especially as in researching the topic, not only we have found no compendium of experience-based research ethics discussions, but a lot of this material is silenced except in the informal interstices of conference meetings - corridor chats, drinks at the bar, wherever colleagues ‘let their hair down’ and speak openly about things that trouble them.

We have asked three colleagues to present their own experiences to facilitate this discussion, to be followed by Marcel Verweij presenting a philosopher’s view of research ethics. An interactive session between these will focus on further developing our collective awareness of the range of dilemmas in fieldwork practices.