Emerging Ethical Challenges in Researching Vulnerable Groups during COVID-19

• In Event: Methods for Race, Ethnicity and Politics

Abstract

The Covid-19 Pandemic has influenced social science research at all stages of pre-, during and post fieldwork and posed new ethical challenges for researchers. The main body for assessing the ethical expediency of the research is the Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) of the research institutions. The literature on research ethics in social sciences and humanities has addressed difficulties and problems related to the standardized procedure of the IRBs that do not sufficiently sensitive to the particularities of social science research. This paper aims to explain how pandemic related ethical challenges and non-pandemic characteristics of the ethical review process are linked and interrelated. First, we examine this question by focusing on the concept of vulnerability that is essential in ethical guidelines in order to “Do No Harm” to anyone who is involved in the research directly or indirectly. To that effect, this paper provides a comprehensive overview of how vulnerability is defined with a particular focus on the distinction between inherent/universal and situational/contextual vulnerability. We discuss the limitations of these two approaches and highlight the need for redefining vulnerability by a multidimensional perspective that can be helpful for overcoming ethical challenges related to the overlapping of health, social, racial, and gender inequalities during the Pandemic. From this perspective, the Covid-19 may be a necessary condition to elaborate a more nuanced understanding of vulnerability. Second, most researchers have not been able to continue or start their fieldwork and have applied for alternative research techniques such as online interviews, visual studies and digital ethnographies due to the travel restrictions and risk of contagion. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different methods by considering informed consent, confidentiality, trust and safety. Advocating a hybrid approach combining face to face and online methods, we elaborate on how multidimensional vulnerability can be applied to “ethics in practice”.

Authors

• Deniz Pelek, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. VAT nr ESQ0818002H

• Vladimir Bortun, Autonomous University of Barcelona

• Eva Ostergaard-Nielsen