Ethics, Reflexivity, and Ethically Important Moments in Research - Guillemin and Gillam
Ethics, Reflexivity, and Ethically Important Moments in Research - Guillemin and Gillam
Ethics, Reflexivity, and Ethically Important Moments in Research - Guillemin and Gillam
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What is This?
Marilys Guillemin
Lynn Gillam
University of Melbourne
Ethical tensions are part of the everyday practice of doing research—all kinds of research.
How do researchers deal with ethical problems that arise in the practice of their research,
and are there conceptual frameworks that they can draw on to assist them? This article
examines the relationship between reflexivity and research ethics. It focuses on what con-
stitutes ethical research practice in qualitative research and how researchers achieve ethi-
cal research practice. As a framework for thinking through these issues, the authors dis-
tinguish two different dimensions of ethics in research, which they term procedural
ethics and “ethics in practice.” The relationship between them and the impact that each
has on the actual doing of research are examined. The article then draws on the notion of
reflexivity as a helpful way of understanding both the nature of ethics in qualitative
research and how ethical practice in research can be achieved.
Picture this scene. You are a researcher working on a study examining women’s
experiences of heart disease. You are interviewing Sonia, a woman in her late 40s with
diagnosed heart disease. Sonia lives on a remote farming property in a rural region.
She is married and has one teenage daughter living at home with herself and her hus-
band. The interview is progressing well. Over a cup of tea in Sonia’s kitchen, you
inquire about the impact of heart disease on her life. Sonia stops and closes her eyes.
After a few moments’ silence, you notice tears welling up in Sonia’s eyes. Sonia tells
you that she is not coping—not because of her heart disease, but because she has just
found out that her husband has been sexually abusing her daughter since she was a
child.
This kind of scenario is not unusual when conducting qualitative re-
search. Most qualitative researchers can describe similar experiences they
Authors’ Note: We would like to gratefully acknowledge the suggestions and com-
ments of our colleagues at the Reflexivity seminar series at which a draft version of this
article was presented.
Qualitative Inquiry, Volume 10 Number 2, 2004 261-280
DOI: 10.1177/1077800403262360
© 2004 Sage Publications
261
tual tool for understanding both the nature of ethics in qualitative research
and how ethical practice in research can be achieved.
Procedural Ethics
In qualitative research that involves humans, one of the early stages of the
research process is the completion of the application form for a research ethics
committee.1 For many researchers, the completion of the research ethics com-
mittee’s application form is a formality, a hurdle to surmount to get on and do
the research. Like many of our qualitative research colleagues, we diligently
answer the questions on the ethics application form, even though they may be
irrelevant to our research. We have learned to write our responses to the ques-
tions in “ethics-committee speak.” This involves using language that the
committee will understand, is free of jargon, but will nonetheless reassure the
committee that we are competent and experienced researchers who can be
trusted. This also involves explaining methodology to a committee who may
be unfamiliar with qualitative methods and in some cases, may be antagonis-
tic toward this type of research. Moreover, we have learned to gloss over some
issues that we know may cause the committee concern, for example, giving
a transcriber, who is external to the research team, access to interview tapes
without seeking direct consent from the participants, or not to draw too much
attention to potential, although unlikely, risks to the researchers when con-
ducting the research (in particular, risks to research assistants or less-
experienced researchers on the research team). The form asks what measures
the researcher/s have put in place in the event of unexpected outcomes or
adverse effects. As indicated in the opening scenario, there are many situa-
tions that are unexpected when doing research that can potentially have
adverse consequences—how can you foresee and plan for all of these? Most
researchers learn quickly that they need to be savvy in addressing the poten-
tial issues of concern of the committee: using the appropriate discourse to en-
sure that applications will be approved as quickly as possible with minimum
changes and dispute, while remaining true to their research integrity.
“Ethics in Practice”
tages. Perhaps these issues may seem unimportant because they have an
“everyday” sort of quality. However, there is much more to ethics than red-
letter dilemmas, and much is missed by not being aware of this. The questions
that we have posed about responding to Sonia represent what we call “ethi-
cally important moments,” where the approach taken or the decision made
has important ethical ramifications, but where the researcher does not neces-
sarily feel himself or herself to be on the horns of a dilemma. In fact, in some
cases, it might be relatively clear how the researcher should respond or pro-
ceed, and yet there is still something ethically important at stake. For exam-
ple, it might be clear that the researcher should not just continue with the
interview as if nothing has happened but instead, should respond directly to
Sonia in some way. That this is clearly the right thing to do does not make the
situation ethically trivial; the moment of response is an ethically important
moment for there is the possibility that a wrong could be done. There can be
all sorts of ethically important moments: when participants indicate discom-
fort with their answer, or reveal a vulnerability; when a research participant
states that he or she does not want to be assigned a pseudonym in the writing
up of the research but wants to have his or her real name reported; or the case
described by Orb et al. (2001) of interviewing victims of violence where the
researcher has to decide how far to probe a participant about a difficult and
distressing experience.
It is this dimension of ethics made up of “ethically important moments”
that is of primary interest in this article. Although this ethical dimension of
research practice is often apparent to researchers, there is little conceptual
work available to draw on to make sense of it. We need both a language to
articulate and understand these ethical issues and an approach that assists us
to deal with these issues when they arise. We will now go on to suggest a way
into this “ethics in practice” dimension and then consider how “ethics in
practice” relates to procedural ethics.
medical ethics is not just about the dramatic questions that are discussed widely
in the popular media or in the philosophical texts. Ethics is what happens in
every interaction between every doctor and every patient. (p. 68)
to jump this hurdle can be a frustrating experience for qualitative social re-
searchers, as a recent discussion paper produced by the American Associa-
tion of University Professors (2000) attests. The discussion paper documents
concerns expressed by a wide range of social researchers that institutional
review boards in the United States are inappropriately applying models from
the biomedical sciences to ethical review of social sciences research. The dis-
cussion paper reports that in the view of these social researchers, the ap-
proach taken by the institutional review boards “was established and has
evolved within a clinical and biomedical framework that does not fit their
research” (American Association of University Professors, 2000, section I,
p. 3). In this context, it is worthwhile to reflect further on the role of research
ethics committee approval. Is it really the case that research ethics at the pro-
cedural level does not fit the practice of qualitative research? Does the process
of applying for approval in any way contribute to ethical research practice?
It is indeed true that the principles and processes used to conduct the ethi-
cal review of qualitative social research were developed initially in the con-
text of biomedical research. The beginnings of procedural ethics are usually
traced to the Nuremberg Trials that occurred after World War II. Among those
tried at Nuremberg were Nazi doctors who had committed terrible abuses on
concentration camp inmates in the name of medical research. One of the out-
comes of the trials was the so-called Nuremberg Code that expressly stated
the obligation of medical researchers to gain the consent of those on whom
they conducted research and not to harm them. The Nuremberg Code was
soon followed by the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki
that restated similar principles. This remains an extremely important interna-
tional reference point for the regulation of medical research, as witnessed by
the recent heated international debate over proposed changes to the Declara-
tion that would have reduced standards of care required for clinical trials in
developing countries (for a discussion of this, see Zion, Gillam, & Loff, 2000).
After these international documents were drafted, individual countries be-
gan to produce and revise their own codes and guidelines, which were gener-
ally modeled on the Declaration of Helsinki.3
Initially, these codes and guidelines were aimed only at biomedical re-
search, but in many countries they came gradually to be extended to all
research involving humans, including social and qualitative research of all
kinds. In the United States in the 1960s, guidelines issued by the Department
of Health and Human Services through the Office of Protection from Research
Risks were initially cast in broad terms to apply in principle to “all research
involving human subjects” (Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Sub-
jects [hereafter, the U.S. Common Rule], 2001, 46.101); however, this applied
only to research that was funded or conducted by 17 federal government
departments. There was also a list of exclusions regarding the types of
research that did not require ethical approval. Many types of social research
appeared on this list of exclusions, including surveys, interviews, and obser-
It would be naïve and mistaken for ethicists to suggest that procedural eth-
ics is the whole of ethics—that ethical issues in the practice of research can be
entirely covered by the ethics committee process. It is within the dimension of
“ethics in practice” that the researcher’s ethical competence comes to the fore.
By this we mean the researcher’s willingness to acknowledge the ethical
dimension of research practice, his or her ability to actually recognize this eth-
ical dimension when it comes into play, and his or her ability to think through
ethical issues and respond appropriately. However, we argue that all of this is
directly related to, and enhanced by, what happens in the ethics committee
process, even though it cannot be ensured or enforced by it. To make our case,
we will identify the fundamental ethical values on which procedural ethics
is based and attempt to show that these values are both (a) relevant to quali-
tative social research and (b) not radically different from the issues and
concerns that have already been identified as arising in the microethical
dimension.
Although in general, ethical codes and guidelines are often not a great
source of ethical enlightenment and typically contain vague motherhood
statements, guidelines for research ethics tend to be much more precise. The
U.S. Common Rule (2001), the Australian NS (Commonwealth of Australia,
1999), and the Canadian TCPS (Medical Research Council of Canada et al.,
1998) all provide reasonable summary statements of the ethical principles
that are central in the standard approaches to research ethics in the discipline
of bioethics. In the U.S. Common Rule (46.111[a]), these are in the form of a list
of criteria that must be met for ethics committee approval, which includes
minimizing harm, informed consent, and protection of privacy. In the Austra-
lian NS, a general principle is enunciated. The NS says that its “guiding
value” is integrity, which it defines as a commitment to the search for knowl-
edge and to honest and ethical conduct (Commonwealth of Australia, 1999,
1.1, p. 11). The NS’s “guiding ethical principle” is respect for persons (Com-
monwealth of Australia, 1999, 1.2, p. 11). This includes respect for the auton-
omy of individuals, achieved mainly by the mechanism of informed consent
(Commonwealth of Australia, 1999, 1.7, p. 12); respect for privacy, achieved at
least partly by rules relating to confidentiality and secure storage of data
(Commonwealth of Australia, 1999, 1.19, p. 13); and respect for the dignity of
persons (Commonwealth of Australia, 1999, 1.4, p. 11). The TCPS includes a
very similar set of guiding ethical principles: respect for persons, respect for
free and informed consent, and respect for privacy and confidentiality
(Medical Research Council of Canada et al., 1998, i.5-6).
The principle of beneficence, which refers to the obligation to act in ways
that benefit other people, or at least in ways that do not harm them, is high-
lighted in all three documents (U.S. Common Rule, 2001, 46.111[a][1]-[2];
Commonwealth of Australia, 1999, 1.3, p. 11; Medical Research Council of
Canada et al., 1998, i.6). Likewise, justice is identified in all of the documents
as an important principle (U.S. Common Rule, 2001, 46.111[a][3]; Common-
wealth of Australia, 1999, 1.5, p. 11; Medical Research Council of Canada et al.,
1998, i.6). Justice here refers specifically to distributive justice, which in the
context of research on humans mainly points to the importance of a fair shar-
ing of the burdens and benefits of research across the whole community.
Among all these principles, particular precedence is given to the principle
of respect for persons: the NS states that “respect for the dignity and well-
being of persons takes precedence over expected benefits to knowledge”
(Commonwealth of Australia, 1999, 1.4, p. 11), whereas the TCPS claims that
Qualitative social researchers are on the whole very sensitive to this ethical
tension. This recognition means that respect for autonomy and the process of
informed consent is just as relevant for qualitative research as it is for biomed-
ical research. Satisfying an ethics committee’s requirement for informed con-
sent is not merely jumping through a bureaucratic hoop. Of course, there may
be significant differences in the way that informed consent is understood as a
formal process. Procedural ethics in the biomedical model work on the basis
of formal written consent, complete with quasi-legal documents and signa-
tures of witnesses. This is particularly emphasized in the U. S. Common Rule
(2001, 46.117). However, there is nothing in the concept of informed consent
that requires any of this. Signed consent forms do not constitute informed
consent, they merely provide evidence (perhaps of questionable value) that
consent has been given, and insofar as procedural ethics requires that consent
not only be given but also documented, this documenting can occur in a num-
ber of ways, such as taping a verbal consent (which is explicitly allowed for by
the Australian NS; Commonwealth of Australia, 1999, 1.7). Informed consent
is at heart an interpersonal process between researcher and participant,
where the prospective participant comes to an understanding of what the
research project is about and what participation would involve and makes his
or her own free decision about whether, and on what terms, to participate.
Together with respect for autonomy, the other ethical principles enunci-
ated in these documents are also highly relevant to qualitative social research.
Avoiding causing harm to participants, for example, is surely an absolutely
basic consideration. Harm, as is widely recognized, is not merely a matter of
physical harm but has many other aspects, including emotional and social
harm.6 Hence, harm can potentially be caused not only by drugs and invasive
procedures in medical research but also by the research methods, such as par-
ticipant observation or in-depth interviewing, typically used in qualitative
research. The possibility of harm to participants is the reason that research
ethics committees are concerned about the methodology of research projects
and the skills of researchers. The committee needs to satisfy itself that partici-
pants are not being exposed to excessive or unnecessary risks, which may
well be the case if the methodology of a project is not sound or a researcher
lacks essential skills.
Although most qualitative researchers are well aware of issues of harm,
the language in which this idea is often couched in ethics application forms
may appear at best ambiguous or at worst, completely irrelevant to qualita-
tive research. The potential harms to participants in qualitative social
research are often quite subtle and stem from the nature of the interaction
between researcher and participant. As such, they are hard to specify, predict,
and describe in ways that ethics application forms ask for and likewise, strate-
gies for minimizing risk are hard to spell out. In Sonia’s case, for example, the
researcher asking more questions than Sonia feels comfortable answering
may cause harm; or harm may be caused by not showing enough interest so
that Sonia feels she has been ignored and disregarded. If the researcher
encourages her to seek outside help or report the situation to the police, Sonia
may feel guilty for not having done this before or feel that the researcher is
blaming her for being too passive, or she may be frightened by the prospect of
outside intervention. Procedural ethics is obviously not the forum in which
issues of potential harm and other such “ethically important moments” can
be fully dealt with—they are too specific and nuanced. Again, it is at the level
of “ethics in practice” that researchers must do the real ethical work in this
regard. However, research ethics committees perform an important function
at the procedural level by forcing qualitative researchers to reflect and think
about the potential harms of their research, even though the questions may
not be answerable at this level. Hence, we concur with the claim in the TCPS
that these principles are “ethical norms that transcend discipline bound-
aries. . . . Fundamental ethical issues and principles in research in human sub-
jects are common across the social sciences and humanities . . . and health sci-
ences” (Medical Research Council of Canada et al., 1998, i.2). However, we
emphasize that these ethical principles alone cannot be expected to address
the everyday ethical difficulties of research practice.
REFLEXIVITY AND
“ETHICS IN PRACTICE”
As we have argued, ethical research is much more than research that has
gained the approval of a research ethics committee. Although research ethics
committees do play an important role in highlighting ethical principles that
are relevant to, and important for, social research, their role is necessarily lim-
ited. Research ethics committees cannot help when you are in the field and
difficult, unexpected situations arise, when you are forced to make imme-
diate decisions about ethical concerns, or when information is revealed that
suggests you or your participants are at risk. We suggested earlier that micro-
ethics might provide a discursive tool to articulate and to validate the kinds
of ethical issues that confront researchers on a day-to-day basis. However,
microethics is not helpful in addressing and dealing with these issues when
they arise. We need a process and a way of thinking that will actually lead to
ethical research practice. This is where we see an important role for reflexivity.
tice of research and comes into play in the field, where research ethics com-
mittees are not accessible.
Research is primarily an enterprise of knowledge construction. The re-
searcher (and coresearchers), with his or her participants, is engaged in pro-
ducing knowledge. This is an active process that requires scrutiny, reflection,
and interrogation of the data, the researcher, the participants, and the context
that they inhabit. We speak of research as a reflexive process, but how do we
define this slippery concept? Mason (1996) stated that reflexive research
means that the researcher should constantly take stock of their actions and their
role in the research process and subject these to the same critical scrutiny as the
rest of their “data.” (p. 6)
Hertz (1997, p. viii) noted that the reflexive researcher does not merely report
the “facts” of the research but also actively constructs interpretations (“What
do I know?”), while at the same time questioning how those interpretations
came about (“How do I know what I know?”).
Jenkins (1992) observed how Bourdieu provided another helpful way of
thinking about reflexivity in research. Bourdieu suggested the reflexive pro-
cess comprises taking two steps back from the subject of the research. The first
step back is the objective observation of the research subject; the next step
back is the reflection of the observation itself. This is akin to the first step pos-
ing the “What do I know?” question and the second step asking the “How do I
know?” question.
Reflexivity in research is not a single or universal entity but a process—an
active, ongoing process that saturates every stage of the research. Harding
(1986, 1987, 1991) reminded us that as researchers, our social and political
locations affect our research. Our research interests and the research ques-
tions we pose, as well as the questions we discard, reveal something about
who we are. Our choice of research design, the research methodology, and the
theoretical framework that informs our research are governed by our values
and reciprocally, help to shape these values. Who we include and who we ex-
clude as participants in our research are revealing. Moreover, our interpreta-
tions and analyses, and how we choose to present our findings, together with
whom we make our findings available to, are all constitutive of reflexive
research. Reflexivity in research is thus a process of critical reflection both on
the kind of knowledge produced from research and how that knowledge is
generated.
[Reflexivity is] a process whereby researchers place themselves and their prac-
tices under scrutiny, acknowledging the ethical dilemmas that permeate the
research process and impinge on the creation of knowledge. (p. 68)
McGraw et al. did not develop this idea, but the comment suggests that our
approach is not stretching the concept of reflexivity beyond its bounds.
On this basis, we can say a little more about how reflexivity could contrib-
ute to ethical research practice. Being reflexive about research practice means
a number of things: first, an acknowledgment of microethics, that is, of the
ethical dimensions of ordinary, everyday research practice; second, sensitiv-
ity to what we call the “ethically important moments” in research practice, in
all their particularities; and third, having or being able to develop a means of
addressing and responding to ethical concerns if and when they arise in the
research (which might well include a way of preempting potential ethical
problems before they take hold).
For example, with the opening scenario of Sonia, a reflexive researcher
would first understand and acknowledge that ethics in research has different
dimensions and that research practice is infused with microethics at all levels.
Second, this understanding would lead to an awareness of the potential im-
pact of the researcher and the research process on the lives of Sonia and the
other participants before the research even commences. This reflexive ques-
tioning would consider the impact of the researcher posing the questions to
Sonia, the questions and wording used by the researcher, the way the ques-
tions are framed, as well as the timing of the questions. This reflexive process
cannot predict all likely ethical problems that may arise in the doing of
research. However, what it does offer is a process that could have foreseen at
least the general sort of predicament that arose in relation to Sonia, or other
potential sorts of consequences that might arise, and offered the researcher
CONCLUSION
Our focus in this article is an examination of what constitutes ethics in
qualitative research. Starting off from a position of seeing procedural ethics
and “ethics in practice” as divorced from one another, we suggest that there is
some common useful ground to consider. Although procedural ethics is
unable to inform and guide all aspects of research practice, it does serve a
valuable function in forcing us to consider and reflect on the fundamental
guiding principles that govern research integrity. Furthermore, it acts as a
practical reminder that we need to be both mindful and active in protecting
our research participants (and ourselves) from harm and undue risks, as well
as affording respect for autonomy.
The concept of microethics is a valuable discursive tool to allow us to talk
about, validate, and better understand the ethically important moments in
research practice. It is limited, however, when it comes to offering guidance in
how to deal with these ethical events. We have argued that this is where the
notion of reflexivity is most useful. Reflexivity is something that most quali-
tative researchers are aware of and incorporate into their research practice; it
is not a new concept. However, what we suggest is that its meaning be ex-
panded so that reflexivity be considered and enacted as a way of ensuring not
just rigorous research practice but also ethical research practice. Being reflex-
ive in an ethical sense means acknowledging and being sensitized to the
microethical dimensions of research practice and in doing so, being alert to
and prepared for ways of dealing with the ethical tensions that arise. As we
have stated, reflexivity does not prescribe specific types of responses to
research situations; rather, it is a sensitizing notion that can enable ethical
practice to occur in the complexity and richness of social research.
NOTES
1. Research ethics committees or boards are known by different names in different
countries; for example, in the United States these committees are known as institutional
review boards, in Australia they are human research ethics committees, in the United
Kingdom they are local research ethics committees, and so on. For simplicity, we will
use the generic term research ethics committees to refer to all bodies that review applica-
tions for ethical approval of research involving humans.
2. Komesaroff (1996, p. 46) noted this, but does not expand on it in this text.
3. McNeill (1993) provided a comprehensive account of the development of the
ethics committee process in a number of different countries.
4. The United Kingdom, however, is somewhat different in that local research ethics
committees are still largely the province of the health care system and are attached to
hospitals or local health authorities and hence, deal primarily with medical research.
Ramcharan and Cutcliffe (2001) discussed the current problems in the United Kingdom
of assessing social research within the largely medical research ethics committee
framework.
5. This Kantian perspective is especially evident in the Tri-Council Policy Statement
(Medical Research Council of Canada, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research
Council of Canada, & Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
1998) that refers frequently to the notion of using a person as a means.
6. Astandard definition of harm in bioethics is that it is “a setback to a person’s inter-
ests.” What counts as interest is controversial, but it clearly extends beyond an interest
in physical well-being. This controversy regards whether interests is a subjective or an
objective notion, but this means that interests can conceivably extend to include any
aspect of a person’s life that that person regards as important. Hence, there are many
ways in which a person can be harmed.
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Marilys Guillemin is a senior lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Health and
Society at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she teaches health
sociology and qualitative research methods to medical students and postgradu-
ate social health students. She has published widely for academic, health profes-
sional, and lay community audiences. Her research work broadly covers the
sociology of health and technology and women’s health in particular.
Lynn Gillam is a senior lecturer in health ethics at the Centre for the Study of
Health and Society and a research fellow in the Research Centre for Applied
Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She
has published in international journals, including Bioethics, Journal of
Medical Ethics and Medicine and Philosophy, and is the author of a well-
known series of introductions to topics in bioethics published in Monash
Bioethics Review. She is coauthor of Facts and Values: An Introduction to
Critical Thinking for Nurses (MacLennan & Petty, 1995), which includes a
large section on ethical reasoning and decision making.