Placing Dialogical Ethics at the Center of Psychological Research

Abstract

When an ethics of liberation motivates psychological research, those schooled in psychological research must involve themselves in a process of re-orientation toward collaboration and dialogue at each stage of research. This requires a concerted shift in one’s own role vis-à-vis the research situation. In most qualitative studies the researcher is at the center of power in the situation: formulating the research area, choosing the research approach and methodology, crafting the research questions, conducting or directing the interview process, interpreting the data, and formulating and distributing the findings. To be part of facilitating research as a liberatory process, this powerfully controlling role often needs to be abandoned for a more dialogical and collaborative one at each stage of the research process. This involves re-thinking research approaches and methodologies, reflecting on where they may consciously or unconsciously foreclose the possibilities of collaborative dialogue throughout the research process, thereby limiting the development of self-understanding and empowerment for all of the research co-participants.

The ethical dilemmas that often surface in qualitative research are not put to rest by scrupulous adherence to the standard procedures for informed consent, anonymity, and confidentiality. “Who owns the data?” is an ethical question that participants in laboratory studies do not think to ask. Whose interpretation counts? Who has veto power? What will happen to the relationships that were formed in the field? What are the researcher’s obligations after the data are collected? Can the data be used against the participants? Will the data be used on their behalf? Do researchers have an obligation to protect the communities and social groups they study or just to guard the rights of individuals? These kinds of questions reveal how much ethical terrain is uncharted by official guidelines, such as those of the American Psychological Association or of IRB reviews.

(Maracek, Fine, & Kidder, 1997, p. 641)

Any qualitative researcher who is not asleep ponders moral and ethical questions: Is my project really worth doing? Do people really understand what they are getting into? Am I exploiting people with my “innocent” questions? What about their privacy? Do respondents have a right to see my report? What good is anonymity if people and their colleagues can easily recognize themselves in a case study? When they do, might it hurt or damage them in some way? What do I do if I observe harmful cases? Who will benefit and who will lose as a result of my study? Who owns the data, and who owns the report? The qualitative literature is full of rueful testimony on such questions, peppered with sentences beginning with “I never expected …” and “If only I had known that …” and “I only belatedly realized that. …” We need to attend more to the ethics of what we are planning and doing.

(Miles and Huberman, 1994, p. 288)