What Do We Want to Tell? And to Whom Do We Want to Tell It? The Ethnographer's Ethical Dilemma

• In Event: Ethnography and Public Scholarship: Ethical Obligations, Tensions, and Opportunities

Abstract

Objectives

Recent events regarding Alice Goffman’s (2014) On the Run have spurred public debates about the ethics of ethnography (Lubet, 2015a, 2015b). The controversy surrounds the fact that the sociologist / ethnographer drove a participant who was armed with a gun and the intent to commit murder. Ethical concerns are not new to ethnography. A previous generation of sociologists and ethnographers faced similar dilemmas (Adler, 1993; Becker, 2015 [1953]; Gopnik, 2015): Did those who studied jazz bands also take drugs with the band members? Did those who studied gangs have knowledge of criminal activity to which the police might prefer to be privy? And yet, with new technologies and media-sharing platforms, ethnographers face increased scrutiny. The paper, as a result, focuses on debates regarding perennial ethical conundrums: what to tell, whether to tell, and to whom it might be told.

Objectives for the paper are twofold:
1. To examine persistent ethical tensions inherent in ethnography as process and product;
2. To acknowledge new ethical dilemmas and opportunities as a result of emergent technologies like digital devices and social media;

Perspective

In an era of high surveillance of faculty members, as well as the pervasiveness of social media, with its instant and sometimes unknown communication networks, social scientists are caught in a kind of paradox. The quandary pits the disciplinary demands of transparency, openness and the complete “story” against the protection of informant and research participant identities, as well as the safeguarding of the social scientist herself against charges that she knew of criminal activity and failed to report it. How are researchers to both provide honest and complete accounts of the contexts they study, and at the same time (especially when they are working with marginalized groups), protect themselves from legal challenges to the work they do?

Methodology and Data Sources

The author reviews literature pertaining to ethics and ethnography. She uses both popular examples of scholarship and personal experiences in the field to examine ethical dilemmas.

Findings

Against the backdrop of “heightened scrutiny” of faculty work as well as threats to academic freedom, social scientists are caught in conflicting and contradictory claims on the ethical stances of their fieldwork. The situation is complicated by increased demands for scholars to produce public scholarship. Such an endeavor requires ethnographers to account for responsibilities to and expectations of multiple audiences—participants, academics, funders, policymakers, and regulatory agencies. In many cases, the conflicting responsibilities do not resolve easily.

Significance

The most recent case of possible ethical malfeasance to pepper the front page of the Chronicle of Higher Education is neither the first, nor will it be the last (Parry, 2015). The instances require scholars to examine both the ethical principles that guide ethnographers as well as the overt accusations and underlying assumptions—such as how scholars produce and evaluate research—that place the important approach at risk.

Author

• Yvonna S. Lincoln, Texas A&M University - College Station