Ethics and Openness in Qualitative Research

• In Event: Dealing with the Replication Crisis

Abstract

The discipline of political science has recently seen lively debate over what comprises ethical research practices. These conversations have considered how the imperative to conduct research ethically interacts with making research more “transparent”; how what is ethical in one setting may not be in other settings (e.g. conflicted, polarized or authoritarian settings); the extent to which distinct research communities -- scholars engaged in field experiments vs ethnographers, for example -- should develop their own standards for the ethical conduct, and transparent presentation, of research; and whether and how and to whom researchers should be accountable for how we carry out our work.
In this essay, drawing on our own experiences as qualitative field researchers as well as what we have learned from playing (divergent) roles in these recent debates, we consider the intersection between ethics and openness, a term we prefer to “transparency” for reasons we explain. Research openness concerns interactions between scholars and their research collaborators, between scholars and their research participants, and between scholars and those who engage with their work. Fundamentally, openness entails the offering of information about the empirical underpinnings of a scholar’s work and about its purpose, funding, and commitment to protection of identities and sensitive information to research participants. Ethical concerns and imperatives impinge on each type of interaction.
We begin by discussing openness between researchers and research participants. We focus in particular on gaining informed consent, which we understand as a collaborative and ongoing process, the challenges that changing political conditions can pose for research openness, and data sharing in particular, and the implications for other researchers of practices perceived by participants as unethical.
We then consider openness between authors and those who read their scholarship and the ethical challenges this facet of openness can pose. A well-known trio of tasks associated with this aspect of openness are sharing information about how data and evidence were gathered or generated (production), sharing information about how data and evidence were interpreted or analyzed (analytic), and sharing the data / evidence themselves. We consider each aspect of researcher-reader openness separately, highlighting the different concerns and opportunities they offer.
We also clarify, justify, and consider the implications of our baseline belief that ethical research practice trumps openness. We suggest that pursuing the three aspects of openness in light of ethical dilemmas and within ethical constraints represents good social science. We describe how openness offers scholars an opportunity: pursued in ways that are appropriate for the type of research being conducted and informed by careful reflection on ethical constraints, revealing the empirical and analytic underpinnings of one’s work demonstrates its power and rigor, as well as its limitations. Openness also provides an opportunity for others to engage more productively with, and evaluate, our work.
Here and throughout we assert that researchers are best-positioned to judge how much of their data and the details of its production can be responsibly shared, and to decide how to do so. Moreover, we argue that when presenting and submitting their work, all researchers should discuss the ethical issues and challenges they faced, and the resolutions they sought and why.
We consider some potential unintended consequences of the drive toward openness – for instance, the inadvertent compromising of scholars’ sovereignty over research choices, the shifting of power and authority, the reinforcing of inequalities and the marginalizing of particular topics and approaches – and consider what can actively be done to make these negative externalities less likely.
We find that despite our distinct paths to writing this article, we agree on many aspects of the intersection of ethics and openness, but also have distinct viewpoints on certain issues. We map those differences and consider how they might be bridged.
We conclude by offering some suggestions that we believe could contribute to bolstering the benefits of openness in qualitative inquiry and mitigating some of its costs and risks, particularly to research participants, always bearing in mind that some research projects are too costly or risky to be ethically pursued. We emphasize the importance of diverse research communities under the qualitative umbrella standing and working together to discern how to make our work more open in ways that do not compromise our epistemological or ethical commitments, and that do not in any way undermine the strength and power of the kinds of inquiry in which we engage.

Authors

• Elisabeth Jean Wood, Yale University

• Diana Kapiszewski, Georgetown University