CAN RESEARCH BE TOO ETHICAL?

1. CAN RESEARCH BE TOO ETHICAL? Martyn Hammersley The Open University Paper given at the Department of Education and Professional Studies, King’s College, London, January 2015

2. Please note! • The question ‘Can research be too ethical?’ is not the same question as ‘Is research ethics important’? • One can believe that research can be too ethical without being committed to believing that ethics is unimportant. • For me ethics is important, but it is not all that is important.

3. Ethical regulation • Virtually all social and educational research must now be approved by an ethics committee • The rise of ethical regulation has increased the attention given to research ethics but also changed the ways in which ethical issues are addressed. • To some extent ‘ethics’ is now taken to mean: getting approval from the ethics committee.

4. ‘The highest ethical standards’ • ‘Discover how King's research is supported by the highest ethical standards.’ (http://www.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/research/index.aspx) • ‘The Open University is committed to maintaining standards of professional conduct in all research activities. Central to the principles that guide research is that it must be conducted in accordance with the highest contemporary ethics standards.’ • (http://www.open.ac.uk/research/ethics/)

5. Ethics as the core of qualitative research • ‘Ethics is foundational to the telos of the research enterprise.’ • (Mertens and Ginsberg 2009:2) • ‘The most important part of doing research: the ethical core that shapes everything else.’ • (Brooks et al 2014:16)

6. Moralism • This is the argument that research must exemplify ethical ideals, and/or that it should be aimed at bringing about some outcome defined in terms of ethical or political ideals, for example countering inequalities. • Here the conclusion reached could be that only participatory inquiry is ethically acceptable. There are at least two routes to this, from a commitment to ‘equality’ or to ‘autonomy’.

7. What is ethics? • A narrower and a broader interpretation: • Concerns how researchers ought to treat the people they study, and perhaps also gatekeepers, funders, and other stakeholders. • Relates to all of the values that should shape the research process. • The first is the dominant sense. I suggest that the broader interpretation is redundant, we don’t need another word for ‘good’.

8. Values relevant to research • Ethical values: an other-regarding concern with minimising any harm from the research, respecting people’s autonomy, preserving their privacy, etc. • Methodological values: a commitment to pursuit of the truth, diligence in the process of inquiry, reflexivity, honesty in reporting, etc. • Prudential values: for example avoiding excessive personal danger in doing the research.

9. Conflicts amongst values • There are conflicting implications for particular cases even amongst ethical values. • For example, there can be a dilemma if, having promised confidentiality of data, someone reveals information about abuse of a kind that one feels ought to be reported. • My point is that, as a result of such conflicts, there is room for reasonable disagreement about what should be done, and therefore about what would count as acting in line with the highest standards.

10. Conflict between methodological and ethical values • The fact that there is such conflict was precisely what led to ethical regulation of medical research, as a result of Nazi doctors’ experiments on concentration camp inmates. • However, conflicts among these types of value are usually much less extreme. • For example, in social research there is a tension between informed consent and trying to minimise the effect of the research process on what is observed and on what people say.

11. The distinctive responsibility of researchers • Methodological and ethical values have different relationships to the research process. • If the goal of research is the production of knowledge, researchers have a distinctive, responsibility to uphold methodological values. • If research is to be justified it must be capable of producing knowledge claims that are more likely to be true than those coming from other sources. And we should not underestimate the difficulty of producing sound knowledge about the social world.

12. The goal of research • The distinctive goal of research as an activity is to produce knowledge that is of value to human beings. Not to challenge inequality, transform the world, trouble the status quo, give voice to marginalised groups, or for that matter drive innovation or serve the UK economy (Fish 2012). • Of course, most of us do our research because we believe that it will have practical benefits. But that is not its goal, other activities have this aim. Our distinctive goal is to produce knowledge. Nor should we assume that increased research knowledge always has good, not bad, results.

13. The role of ethical values • If we are adopting the narrow definition of ‘ethical’, ethical values are not inherent to or constitutive of the research process because they do not form its goal. • However, they do play an important external regulative role in keeping research within the limits of what is acceptable. • [Note that word ‘acceptable’: researchers are not required to abide by the highest ethical standards, satisfactory ones will do!]

14. Compromise, compromise • We cannot always pursue inquiry in the most effective way because doing so would sometimes be unethical, involving unacceptable harm or unacceptable infringement of people’s autonomy or privacy. • But just as we may sometimes have to compromise our methodological values, so too we may need to compromise ethical values. • In both cases, there are difficult questions about what are and are not acceptable compromises.

15. A danger of moralism • Moralism leads to heightened ethical sensitivity. • Ethical sensitivity may sometimes need to be increased of course. • However, we can also be excessively ethically sensitive in that we over-emphasise ethical problems.

16. An analogy • If, in buying food, one were to be fully sensitive to the ethical issues potentially involved in its production, one could well starve. With some products one would not have all of the relevant information about how it was produced and distributed, the effect on the environment, the treatment of animals, etc. And how reliable is the information provided? So, most of the food on offer may have to be rejected. • Unfortunately, here, as in doing research, we have to compromise.

17. Conclusion • I hope you will now agree with me that while research ethics is important, it is possible to give it too much importance. • There is currently pressure to do this, as a result of ethical regulation and misconceptions about qualitative inquiry. • These trends are likely to have damaging consequences for social research. • The final message is that we need to be clearer about the values informing research and the different roles they play.

18. A word from the wise • ‘The only safe way to avoid violating principles of professional ethics is to refrain from doing social research altogether.’ • (Urie Bronfenbrenner 1952:452)

19. References • Bronfenbrenner, U. (1952) ‘Principles of professional ethics: Cornell studies in social growth’, The American Psychologist, 7, pp452-5. • Brooks, R. et al (2014) Ethics and Education Research, London, Sage. • Fish, S. (2012) Save the World on Your Own Time, New York, Oxford University Press. • Mertens, D. and Ginsberg, P. (eds.) (2009) Handbook of Research Ethics, Thousand Oaks CA, Sage. • Some elements and implications of the argument presented here are developed in: • ‘Should social science be critical?’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 35, 2, pp175-95, 2005. • ‘Against the ethicists: on the evils of ethical regulation’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology 12, 3, 2009, pp 211-225. • (with A. Traianou) Ethics and Qualitative Research, London, Sage, 2012. • ‘On the ethics of interviewing for discourse analysis’, Qualitative Research, 14, 5, 2014, pp529-541 • ‘Research ethics and the concept of children’s rights’, Children and Society, forthcoming. • ‘On ethical principles for social research’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, forthcoming 2014. • (with A. Traianou) (2011): ‘Moralism and research ethics: a Machiavellian perspective’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 14, 5, pp379-390. • (with A. Traianou) (2013) ‘Foucault and Research Ethics: On the autonomy of the researcher’, Qualitative Inquiry, 20, 3, pp227–238. • (with A. Traianou) (2014) ‘An Alternative Ethics? Justice and Care as Guiding Principles for Qualitative Research’, Sociological Research Online, 19, 3.

20. Links • These slides can be found at: https://martynhammersley.wordpress.com/slides-from-talks/ • You can find information about the research ethics literature at https://www.bera.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Ethics-and-Educational-Research.pdf