18.1  Ethical responsibility and cultural respectfulness

Mavs Open Press

18.1 Ethical responsibility and cultural respectfulness

Learning Objectives

Learners will be able to…

Explain how our ethical responsibilities as researchers translate into decisions regarding qualitative sampling
Summarize how aspects of culture and identity may influence recruitment for qualitative studies

Representation

Representation reflects two important aspects of our work as qualitative researchers, who is present and how are they presented. First, we need to consider who we are including or excluding in or sample. Recruitment and sampling is especially tied to our ethical mandate as researchers to uphold the principle of justice under the Belmont Report ^[1] (see Chapter 6 for additional information). Within this context we need to:

Assure there is fair distribution of risks and benefits related to our research
Be conscientious in our recruitment efforts to support equitable representation
Ensure that special protections to vulnerable groups involved in research activities are in place

As you plan your qualitative research study, make sure to consider who is invited and able to participate and who is not. These choices have important implications for your findings and how well your results reflect the population you are seeking to represent. There may be explicit exclusions that don’t allow certain people to participate, but there may also be unintended reasons people are excluded (e.g. transportation, language barriers, access to technology, lack of time).

Example. Perhaps you are interested in studying the experience of Latinx adults over the course of the past two decades. You decide to gather data by holding focus groups in the evening. Based on previous research and community member input, you surmise that older adults in this community have a hard time getting out in the evening, and this is likely to affect who is represented in our final sample. By failing to address this, the inadvertent exclusion of older adult voices from your data could be disempowering for this subgroup, and could limit the inclusion of valuable perspectives in your study. In anticipation of this, you could plan to arrange for transportation for those participants that may have difficulty getting to your location in the evening and/or you may decide to host some of the groups at different times.

The second part of representation has to do with how we disseminate our findings and how this reflects on the population we are studying. We will speak further about this aspect of representation in Chapter 21, which is specific to qualitative research dissemination. For now, it is enough to know that we need to be thoughtful about who we attempt to recruit and how effectively our resultant sample reflects our population.

Being mindful of history

As you plan for the recruitment of your sample, be mindful of the history of how this group (and/or the individuals you may be interacting with) has been treated – not just by the research community, but by others in positions of power. As researchers, we usually represent an outside influence and the people we are seeking to recruit may have significant reservations about trusting us and being willing to participate in our study (often grounded in good historical reasons—see Chapter 6 for additional information). Because of this, be very intentional in your efforts to be transparent about the purpose of your research and what it involves, why it is important to you, as well as how it can impact the community. Also, in helping to address this history, we need to make concerted efforts to get to know the communities that we research with well, including what is important to them.

Example. In one research project that I worked on, we specifically met with a group of Black community members and discussed their thoughts about being asked to participate in a research project, specifically a project that would ask them to share genetic information. Many of them mentioned that they would be highly skeptical and likely refuse participation. They mentioned incidents like that of Henrietta Lacks and the Tuskegeee Syphillis Study being handed down to them as examples of why researchers are not to be trusted and as evidence that research is not truly concerned with the wellbeing of the Black community. Furthermore, they felt that academic institutions had become somewhat of a nuisance in their local neighborhoods. Researchers from many different disciplines were frequently asking neighborhood residents to participate in their studies, but after it was over, they were never seen in the neighborhood again. What steps can we take to genuinely change this justified narrative?

Stories as sacred: How are we requesting them?

Finally, it is worth pointing out that as qualitative researchers, we have an extra layer of ethical and cultural responsibility. While quantitative research deals with numbers, as qualitative researchers, we are generally asking people to share their stories. Stories are intimate, full of depth and meaning, and can reveal tremendous amounts about who we are and what makes us tick. Because of this, we need to take special care to treat these stories as sacred. I will come back to this point in subsequent chapters, but as we go about asking for people to share their stories, we need to do so humbly.

Key Takeaways

As researchers, we need to consider how our participant communities have been treated historically, how we are representing them in the present through our research, and the implications this representation could have (intended and unintended) for their lives. We need to treat research participants and their stories with respect and humility.
When conducting qualitative research, we are asking people to share their stories with us. These “data” are personal, intimate, and often reflect the very essence of who our participants are. As researchers, we need to treat research participants and their stories with respect and humility.

National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. (1979). The Belmont report: Ethical principles and guidelines for the protection of human subjects of research. Retrieved from https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-report/read-the-belmont-report/index.html ↵