Ethical Considerations

Have you ever been misrepresented or portrayed in a negative light? It doesn’t feel good. It especially doesn’t feel good when the person portraying us has power, control and influence. While you might not feel powerful, research can be a powerful tool, and can be used and abused for many ends. Once research is out in the world, it is largely out of our control, so we need to approach dissemination with care. Be thoughtful about how you represent your work and take time to think through the potential implications it may have, both intended and unintended, for the people it represents.

As alluded to in the paragraph above, research comes with hefty responsibilities. You aren’t off the hook if you are conducting quantitative research. While quantitative research deals with numbers, these numbers still represent people and their relationships to social problems. However, with qualitative research, we are often dealing with a smaller sample and trying to learn more from them. As such, our job often carries additional weight as we think about how we will represent our findings and the people they reflect. Furthermore, we probably hope that our research has an impact; that in some way, it leads to change around some issue. This is especially true as social work researchers. Our research often deals with oppressed groups, social problems, and inequality. However, it’s hard to predict the implications that our research may have. This suggests that we need to be especially thoughtful about how we present our research to others.

Two of the core values of social work involve respecting the inherent dignity and worth of each person, practicing with integrity, and behaving in a trustworthy manner.^[1] As social work researchers, to uphold these values, we need to consider how we are representing the people we are researching. Our work needs to honestly and accurately reflect our findings, but it also needs to be sensitive and respectful to the people it represents. In Chapter 6 we discussed research ethics and introduced the concept of beneficence or the idea that research needs to support the welfare of participants. Beneficence is particularly important as we think about our findings becoming public and how the public will receive, interpret and use this information. Thus, both as social workers and researchers, we need to be conscientious of how dissemination of our findings takes place.

Qualitative research often has a voyeuristic quality to it, as we are seeking a window into participants’ lives by exploring their experiences, beliefs, and values. As qualitative researchers, we have a role as stewards or caretakers of data. We need to be mindful of how data are gathered, maintained, and most germane to our conversation here, how data are used. We need to craft research products that honor and respect individual participants (micro), our collective sample as a whole (meso), and the communities that our research may represent (macro).As we prepare to disseminate our findings, our ethical responsibilities as researchers also involve honoring the commitments we have made during the research process. We need to think back to our early phases of the research process, including our initial conversations with research partners and other stakeholders who helped us to coordinate our research activities. If we made any promises along the way about how the findings would be presented or used, we need to uphold them here. Additionally, we need to abide by what we committed to in our informed consent. Part of our informed consent involves letting participants know how findings may be used. We need to present our findings according to these commitments. We of course also have a commitment to represent our research honestly.

As an extension of our ethical responsibilities as researchers, we need to consider the impact that our findings may have, as well as our need to be socially conscientious researchers. As scouts, we were taught to leave our campsite in a better state than when we arrived. It is helpful to think of research in these terms. Think about the group(s) that may be represented by your research; what impact might your findings have for the lives of members of this group? Will it leave their lives in a better state than before you conducted your research? As a responsible researcher, you need to be thoughtful, aware and realistic about how your research findings might be interpreted and used by others. As social workers, while we hope that findings will be used to improve the lives of our clients, we can’t ignore that findings can also be used to further oppress or stigmatize vulnerable groups; research is not apolitical and we should not be naive about this. It is worth mentioning the concept of sustainable research here. Sustainable research involves conducting research projects that have a long-term, sustainable impact for the social groups we work with. As researchers, this means that we need to actively plan for how our research will continue to benefit the communities we work with into the future. This can be supported by staying involved with these communities, routinely checking-in and seeking input from community members, and making sure to share our findings in ways that community members can access, understand, and utilize them. Nate Olson provides a very inspiring Ted Talk about the importance of building resilient communities. As you consider your research project, think about it in these terms.

Critical Considerations

This is the part of our research that is shared with the public and because of this, issues like reciprocity, ownership, and transparency are relevant. We need to think about who will have access to the tangible products of our research and how that research will get used. As researchers, we likely benefit directly from research products; perhaps it helps us to advance our career, obtain a good grade, or secure funding. Our research participants often benefit indirectly by advancing knowledge about a topic that may be relevant or important to them, but often don’t experience the same direct tangible benefits that we do. However, a participatory perspective challenges us to involve community members from the outset in discussions about what changes would be most meaningful to their communities and what research products would be most helpful in accomplishing those changes. This is especially important as it relates to the role of research as a tool to support empowerment.

Ownership of research products is also important as an issue of power and control. We will discuss a range of venues for presenting your qualitative research, some of which are more amenable to shared ownership than others. For instance, if you are publishing your findings in an academic journal, you will need to sign an agreement with that publisher about how the information in that article can be used and who has access to it. Similarly, if you are presenting findings at a national conference, travel and other conference-related expenses and requirements may make access to these research products prohibitive. In these instances, the researcher and the organization(s) they negotiate with (e.g. the publishing company, the conference organizing body) share control. However, disseminating qualitative findings in a public space, public record, or community-owned resource means that more equitable ownership might be negotiated. An equitable or reciprocal arrangement might not always be able to be reached, however. Transparency about who owns the products of research is important if you are working with community partners. To support this, establishing a Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) or Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) early in the research process is important. This document should clearly articulate roles, responsibilities, and a number of other details, such as ownership of research products between the researcher and the partnering group(s).

In our discussion about qualitative research, we have also frequently identified the need for the qualitative researcher to account for their role throughout the research process. Part of this accounting can specifically apply to qualitative research products. This is our opportunity to demonstrate to our audience that we have been reflective throughout the course of the study and how this has influenced the work we did. Some qualitative research studies include a positionality statement within the final product. This is often toward the beginning of the report or the presentation and includes information about the researcher(s)’s identity and worldview, particularly details relevant to the topic being studied. This can include why you are invested in the study, what experiences have shaped how you have come to think about the topic, and any positions or assumptions you make with respect to the topic. This is another way to encourage transparency. It can also be a means of relegating or at least acknowledging some of our power in the research process, as it can provide one modest way for us, as the researcher, to be a bit more exposed or vulnerable, although this is a far cry from making the risks of research equitable between the researcher and the researched. However, the positionality statement can be a place to integrate our identities, who we are as an individual, a researcher, and a social work practitioner. Granted, for some of us that might be volumes, but we need to condense this down to a brief but informative statement—don’t let it eclipse the research! It should just be enough to inform the audience and allow them to draw their own conclusions about who is telling the story of this research and how well they can be trusted. This student provides a helpful discussion of the positionality statement that she developed for her study. Reviewing your reflexive journal (discussed in Chapter 20 as a tool to enhance qualitative rigor) can help in identifying underlying assumptions and positions you might have grounded in your reactions throughout the research process. These insights can be integrated into your positionality statement. Please take a few minutes to watch this informative video of a student further explaining what a positionality statement is and providing a good example of one.