Question of ethics in my paperwork

Published on Tuesday 18 March 2008 19:02

IN ORDER to carry out fieldwork for my PhD, I’ve applied for clearance from my department’s ethics committee. My study involves students in my department, so I need to show there are no conflicting interests.

Unsurprisingly, the ethics paperwork was less about rigorous moral questioning and more about protecting participants (and protecting the university from lawsuits). Will participants be risking physical danger or psychological distress? Will their information be kept confidential and anonymous? Does the project require highly personal information? Does it involve deception?

While it’s comforting to know there are oversight structures to protect participants, those structures lack space to consider wider ethical questions. Paperwork can’t easily capture fundamental questions about the power relationships embodied in the research process, or the wider social role of a project or discipline. Red tape cannot easily determine who benefits from the outcomes of research, or who suffers. What we choose to study, how we choose to learn, and whom we choose to share our knowledge with can have wide-reaching social effects. The ambiguity of these issues makes them crucial to address through self-reflection and honest conversation. The answers may never tick any boxes on an ethics form, but they will go well beyond protecting the immediate safety of participants.

Research can be used as a strategic tool for positive social change, but some scholars would cringe at that description. Better to remain morally neutral, they would argue, to seek knowledge for its own sake and avoid making value judgments about society. But the decision to avoid value judgments is itself a moral position, implicitly giving consent to the status quo. C Wright Mills, one of sociology’s great pioneers, wrote in 1959 that “anyone who spends his life studying society and publishing the results is acting morally and usually politically as well”.

To me, these are the kinds of issues at stake when we talk about research ethics – if scholars don’t give careful thought to how we work and how our work may be used, who will? I’m lucky my department takes these issues seriously and gives them more than passing mention. But leaving such fundamental questions up to luck seems irresponsible.

Considering ethics through the tunnel-vision of paperwork reflects a pattern of fragmentation in society. I hope to mend some of that fragmentation in my project by asking difficult questions. I want to talk about real ethical issues, try to understand why we pursue knowledge and what we hope for when we release it into the world.

&#149 Myshele Goldberg is a PhD student at Strathclyde University. See www.myshelegoldberg.com