Who Is This Research For? Finding the "Ethical" in Community Organization–Researcher Relationships

• In Event: Reimagining Collaborative Research Ethics: Epistemic Authority, African Wisdom, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, and Gray Zones

Abstract

Ethical questions are central to all social science and humanities-oriented research, and this of course includes collaborative research with/in communities. In this paper, I offer an examination of the complex relationship and tensions that may emerge between researchers and community organization staff members within the context of the current education reform climate, by focusing on the philosophical dimensions of data interpretation and analysis.

My examination is guided by the following questions: How can university-based researchers sustain democratic approaches to research and ethical relationships between the researchers and the community organizations with which they collaborate? How are such issues complicated by competing knowledge claims? I aim to explore the ways in which our democratic approach to collaborative research with a community organization played out as my research team and I engaged in data collection and analysis in collaboration with the staff of a local affiliate of the I Have a Dream program. I Have a Dream is an educational outreach program that aims to lessen inequalities and expand opportunities to low-income students, most of whom are also students of color, recent immigrants, and English Language Learners. Relying on three key principles of democratic theory and collaborative research—inclusion, dialogue, and deliberation—in the course of the two-year study, we collaboratively developed the research design, formed close relationships with I Have a Dream staff members, and shared our plans for data analysis and the initial themes we identified within the data (Gutmann & Thompson 1996; House & Howe 1999; Young, 2000).

The sociopolitical context of education reform, seemingly far removed from the I Have a Dream offices where we met, seemed to influence staff members’ reactions to our initial qualitative findings. As we encountered resistance to some of the themes that emerged from the data, we needed to balance the use of researcher resources with the expertise of the I Have a Dream staff members. For example, we noticed that AmeriCorps volunteers working with youth from new immigrant communities would predominantly conceptualize educational barriers as residing within the students’ families. In a collaborative meeting with the leaders of the community organization, we shared the theme of the AmeriCorps volunteers’ deficit perspectives and faced a lot of resistance to that interpretation. Although the community organization leaders recognized that the way the AmeriCorps volunteers characterized their students and their families was problematic, they did not agree that it was deficit framing or that it needed to be addressed. From this experience, key questions emerged: How do we engage ethically with resistant community partners and work to understand the resistance? What should researchers do when their interpretations of community partners’ equity practices are challenged? Attention to these issues is essential if we are to understand why and how to go about meaningfully ethical collaborative practices with/in community organizations (Su 2010).

Author

• Michele Moses, University of Colorado Boulder