A Workshop on:
The Ethical Dimensions of Field Research
11th March 2015
Keele Management School
Room CM0.12, Claus Moser Research Centre
Workshop summary
This workshop will focus on ethical issues that emerge in the context of doing field research, from interview-based and ethnographic research to field experiments, i.e. any empirical research project that involves human participants.
Courses on ethics - especially those on applied or professional ethics, but also, at times, those on research ethics more broadly - often depart from a philosophical approach, treating ethics as it is framed in that discipline. While philosophical concepts may be intellectually interesting, they do not get at the heart of ethical challenges that emerge in the midst of doing field research. Moreover, the current emphasis on university-based review of research proposals, while itself attending to key issues in researcher-researched relationships, often misses the practical ethical issues that arise in a research setting. These review procedures, commonly focusing on protecting human ‘subjects’ through the vehicle of informed consent and privacy protections, shift researchers’ attention to administrative processes and compliance, away from what should be discipline- and method-based ethics discussions rooted in the relationships between researchers and those being researched.
This workshop will explore these tensions. In asking how, and where, ethical issues arise, we will surface some of the difficulties that these approaches pose for research practice. The workshop will also encourage participants to consider how research ethics might be approached somewhat differently, drawing on sensitivities to the complexities of power relations in research, including the values of reciprocity, trust, etc. Framing the question in a positive way, rather than asking ‘What makes research unethical?’, will allow us to highlight ways of looking at ethics that are different from both philosophical and administrative approaches, including the concerns that have been developing under the heading ‘the relational turn’.
Biographies
Tina Miller is Professor of Sociology at Oxford Brookes University. Her research interests include constructions of gender and identities, qualitative research methods and ethics. She is co-editor of Ethics in Qualitative Research, 2nd ed. Sage (2012). Tina is currently working a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship on the topic of 'Managing modern family lives: public understandings and everyday practises of caring and paid work'. She has been engaged as an expert advisor by the World Health Organisation (Geneva), think tanks and political parties in the UK and presented her work at UNICEF headquarters (New York) as well as in Australia, India and Argentina.
Dvora Yanow is Professor of Organizational Studies at Keele University and Guest Professor in the Communication, Philosophy, and Technology group at Wageningen University, The Netherlands. She is a policy/political and organisational ethnographer and interpretive methodologist. Her research is shaped by an overall interest in the generation and communication of knowing and meaning in organisational and policy settings. Current research topics include practice studies, research regulation (ethics board) policies and built space/place analysis. Her most recent book is Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes (Routledge 2012), with Peregrine Schwartz-Shea. She is co-editor of Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn (ME Sharpe 2013).
Emma Bell is Professor of Management and Organisation Studies at Keele University. Her work focuses on organisation studies and research methods in the context of critical management studies, where she has investigated issues such as gender, emotion, religion, spirituality and organisational memory. She is co-author of Business Research Methods (4th ed. 2015) and A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Management Research (2013), and co-editor of Routledge Companion to Visual Organisation (2014) and Sage Major Works in Qualitative Research in Business and Management (2014).
Programme
09.30-10.00 / Registration and welcome10.00-11.00 / Ethics concerns of governmental policies and review committees - Dvora Yanow
11.00-11.30 / Coffee/tea break
11.30-12.30 / Reconfiguring research relationships: Regulation, new technologies and doing ethical research - Tina Miller
12.30-13.30 / Lunch
13.30-14.30 / Ethics in translation: Doing research in diverse cultural contexts - Emma Bell
14.30-15.00 / Coffee/tea break
15.00-17.00 / Topic-focused small group discussions (e.g. doing research ‘under cover’; incentivising ‘informants’; protecting the researcher; researching powerful organizations/individuals)
Concluding plenary discussion
Pre-work
Participants will be asked to indicate 2-3 ethical issues or questions that they are bringing to the workshop and these will form the basis for group work.
How to register for the workshop:
Please complete the online booking form at http://lubswww.leeds.ac.uk/narti/events/
Places are limited so please book your place early to avoid disappointment.
How to get to Keele Management School
http://www.keele.ac.uk/findus/ The workshop will be held in room CM0.12 in the Claus Moser Research Centre.
Please contact if you have any further questions.