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Hi Sue and NIs
Thank you for reading my email. I
think you are absolutely right about this and being immersed as you say in one’s own research and personal agenda one may become blinded to the more obvious ethical issues and having a disinterested group’s view point could highlight these seemingly undiscovered
points.
I agree with your statement about
the potential effect of researcher on a closed group, we hold a powerful position which I have become increasingly aware of having made a leap from quantitative researcher (years in a lab) to a qualitative one and this worries me greatly.
Lawton, Garstka and Hanks describe the ‘mask of theory’ where the approaches we take to our research and the full meaning of data we collect may not be fully apparent to us or the effects we have on our participants, this theoretical mask being unwittingly
shaped by our own culture and historical influences’.
A recent article that I was directed
to and others has really helped me to understand my place as a researcher and the approach I should take, it is by Arthur Frank ‘What Dialogical research is and why we should do it’.
I find it very difficult to summarise this is a few lines and I am sure others can do a much better job or perhaps read the paper? He hinges his paper on work by Bakhtin.
In summary current monological discourses are all too apparent in medical diagnosis, genetic profiling etc., where such reports seek to have the last word on a person.
A dialogical discourse on the other hand begins with the recognition of others unfinalizability and depends on perpetual openness and it doesn’t end in a final statement of who the research participants are but as a moving continual dialogue as they
continue to become who they may yet be.
Anyway, I remain in a perpetual circle
of frustration chasing my own tail with my research question. Should I fictionalise or not.
I think not.
Kindest regards
C
Hi, yes it does seem intuitive that if you know people and they know and trust you, they should be aware of the issues, however, they might not be, especially when it goes beyond the individual. One of the reasons we have ethical submissions is that the individual researchers may not consider all of the issues, because they may not appreciate the wider issues themselves whereas a disinterested group has a variety of perspectives and can at the least act in an advisory capacity. I know people know this but we don't always think through the whole situation for the people concerned, not deliberately, but especially if we have a self interest. For instance, say someone was investigating a closed group, say whose comparitive poverty of circumstance didn't usually expose their own practices or attitudes to a wider critical view. If there was some clumsy handling of expressed feedback, it might expose the group to a different perspective, that illuminated limited horizons; it could be quite a shock and actually destroy the trust of the community of interest, it could allow people to escape that poverty but what if there were no avenues for escape, or in order to escape they had to cross some boundary that they wouldn't have understood the reason before - it's not just is that ethical? but what is the potential effect and is that justified by the research knowledge gained.
I know I've just launched into this from lurking... Sue.
Dear Chrissie (and all),
Yes Chrissie, you’ll need to go for university ethics approval through FREGC.
Nigel and I had to do the same before writing Living in the Borderlands, and I had to ask my wife to sign an informed consent form which felt very strange. It’s a tricky one. There is a small literature dealing with some of the tensions, incl. relational-situational vs procedural ethics in autoethnography, and whether the methodology actually constitutes empirical research in the sense ethical committees are used to. Carol Rambo, whose work is part of this, actually claimed that what she was doing was oral/social history when it came to the crunch for her (can send you the relevant refs if you want?).
Right now, I personally think such committees and processes (of which I’m part here at Brighton) constitute blunt and inapt tools for making ethical judgements on AE, but they’re what we have and we have to go through them. Maybe in the future the ethical processes will develop and be more responsive to AE, but right now this is what we have to do if you’re involving other people in your research, as opposed to, eg, using fiction as a literary device.
Difficult one, I know. Good luck!
Best,
Alec
From: Narrative Inquiry where social science meets art [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of [log in to unmask]
Sent: 03 November 2011 11:41
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: I have a queer feeling!
Hi All
Hope you are all well.
I just thought I’d ask if anybody could throw some light on an ethical question.
I am currently trying to work (emphasis on trying) on an autoethnographic piece of work that involves three family members, myself included. The piece itself will be grounded in Queer Theory/Sexual identity.
It is essentially a dialogue between the three of us to be presented in a way not to far from how the narrative is presented in Short et al., ‘Living in the Borderlands’ or in Ellis’s Heartful Autoethnography, but I am not sure yet.
I have carried out preliminary interviews but will be going back again in a couple of weeks to record more detailed data in response to specific questions. I have the full consent of the individuals concerned to do this.
However, it does occur to me that I am employed in the university of Brighton as researcher and that obviously my current research had to go through ethics approval. Do I need to do the same for my autoethnographic work, although this is not commissioned research by the University and being privately conducted, however it is my intention that the work be viewed by an autoethnographic study group (includes University employees and others) which does technically mean publication in the legal sense.
Should I stop what I am doing and seek advice or am I seeing more in this than I should?
Thanks for reading this.
Kindest regards
Chrissy
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