Research Ethics: Between Formal Norms
that adhering to ethical standards was often difficult or challenging in practice due to some of the social values in the research setting. For example, I was confronted with the paradoxical effect of confidentiality guidelines: My insisting on an undisturbed confidential one-on-one interview situation might have negative consequences for the interviewee, since such a secluded conversation would be perceived as secretive and could raise suspicion among the village elite and community members toward my interviewee. This is similar to Riessmann’s (2005) experience of research in South India where she found that trying to comply with the code of confidentiality resulted in problems between participants and their families. The social norms, as well as community practices, interfered with the implementation of the ethical standard of confidentiality.
In my experience, minimizing harm to research participants not only is an ethical obligation but also creates a favorable atmosphere and allows one to access deeper data. I was very much concerned about causing no additional harm, as my intervie-wees were survivors of a severe earthquake and I wanted to prevent any additional suffering. I aimed at a relationship based on respect toward one another that could positively influence achieving the research goals, while at the same time benefitting the research participants. After 3 years of research, I would argue that research ethics are about building relationships and maintaining well-being on both sides.
6.1 Evoking Negative Experiences: How to Avoid Hurtful Topics
Throughout the research process, I experienced an internal conflict about evoking community members’ memories of their unpleasant experiences. The 2006 earth-quake was a horrible disaster that caused great stress among survivors. Being an earthquake survivor myself, I could understand this condition very well. I shared the sociocultural orientation and customs of the people in the study. However, I did not live in the Bantul district but in a neighboring urban region that was less severely affected by the quake. Even if the destruction was less in comparison to Bantul, the aftermath had a terrible impact. Having experienced it myself, I sometimes had the urge to share my experience with colleagues or friends, but sometimes sharing my own experience evoked feelings of anxiety as they remembered the earthquake. If I experienced these feelings of anxiety, then what about the survivors from the Bantul area who were perhaps still haunted by memories of the earthquake?
I started interviewing for the study approximately 2 years after the 2006 quake.
As I had been, many people were still enthusiastic about sharing their incredible ex-periences of the earthquake, especially with new people or strangers, but I wondered whether or not this could become a negative or harmful experience. The thought that reliving the events could cause harm to these people made me feel uncomfort-able. Yet, this research aimed at obtaining data about the survivors’ experiences that would help understand what lessons had been learned and, also perhaps, alleviate the suffering of others in the future. These conflicts dominated my thoughts.
The interview guidelines given by the German team recommended approaching the topic of suffering slowly and indirectly; however, it was necessary to explain the research topic and aims right in the beginning, since we as interviewers were obligated to ask the subjects for informed consent. The procedure of obtaining informed consent brought us straight to the hot topic, the 2006 earthquake. In my cultural context, people tend to discuss only the positive and are discouraged from discussing the negative. Therefore, relating negative memories can make them feel uncomfortable.
I was afraid to undermine the condition of my interviewees through a sensitization process, because it might have forced them to choose between telling the truth and following the norm of discussing only positive topics.
In our research team, we discussed the possibility that remembering past adverse or uncomfortable feelings could create an unfavorable psychological condition in participants, even though the process could also have therapeutic effects, much like the process of exposure therapy. According to Feske (2008), such prolonged exposure can lead to the improvement of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. We thus equally considered whether talking about these feelings could actually have a positive impact and allow people to demonstrate their resilience and ability to cope.
In order to deal with this dilemma of immediately bringing up the subject of suffer-ing in order to obtain informed consent, I felt it would be better to start the interview encounter with more comfortable conditions and conversations. Before obtaining the subject’s informed consent, I chose to chat and converse in a relaxed manner until I felt more “at ease” to begin the discussion about their earthquake experiences.
I did that to build a general rapport, but I was also following the ethical code of the Indonesian Psychology Association, Himpunan Psikologi Indonesia (HIMPSI).
HIMPSI guidelines stipulate that the psychologist, as a researcher, should attempt to maintain participants’ well-being, referring to psychological aspects of well-being, such as emotions or social life. It also offers information regarding keeping the data-gathering process safe and providing comfort to the participants.
Personally, I used my own indictor of feeling “at ease” and found that I did not have any barriers when communicating about the research with the participants. This resulted in the participants feeling more comfortable in discussing the earthquake experiences early on. I believe that it is effective for researchers to use their own emotions as a personal indicator of the unease of participants. An empathetic atti-tude while carrying out research helps in understanding the readiness of research participants to speak about topics that are part of the researcher’s agenda. Empathy can be described as a researcher being able to find the right time to bring up the sensitive research topic. However, using the emotional state of a researcher as an indicator of the participant’s condition (or process of mirroring) also has the poten-tial to lead to misinterpretations or early judgments (and even collusion in avoiding particular topics on the basis of a shared background).
During the research, I learned how to handle the process of mirroring in order to minimize misinterpretations or early judgments. It is crucial to be sensitive to the bodily and emotional reactions of the participant and continue to monitor both throughout an interview. Rechecking what I felt or sensed during the interaction could help in ensuring the real, authentic, or factual condition of both the interviewer and
the interviewee. The process of understanding bodily reactions and then rechecking was reinforced by the basic condition that the participants and I came from the same cultural background. In rechecking, I was interested in achieving a better understanding of participants’ feelings, opinions, or initial ideas as they emerged in my interaction with them. It allowed me to dig deeper into the emotional or psychological condition of the participants and the feelings evoked by our interaction while maintaining a sense of a social connection as the interview progressed.
In retrospect, excessive emotions such as crying, bodily reactions, or anxiety were not evoked. This may have been caused by two things. First, villagers had been habitually exposed to research due to the experience of this natural disaster. As survivors, the exposure of their stories sometimes resulted in a kind of reward, for example, the presence of aid or a feeling that they were the focus of attention. Second, the local people had actually undergone a process of recovery; most of them had been able to accept the unpleasant experience positively. I understood this acceptance due to the sociocultural values of the local people, mainly a submission (pasrah) and resignation (nrimo) to one’s fate . This response of acceptance subsequently became a special discussion in this book about the concept of coping among the Javanese people (see Chaps. 11 and 12).
The process of relating their difficult experiences became a process of release and healing. Most subjects told their stories easily, though some subjects needed a few minutes before they were able to continue calmly. In my opinion, an important issue to consider while conducting research in a disaster setting is that of excessive emotions. Excessive emotions can act as an alarm for the research team, which should assist in minimizing harm. In this case study based in Bantul, for example, this topic was considered because of the cultural tradition of avoiding or hindering extreme emotions.
6.2 The Problem of Informed Consent Versus Developing Closeness
Informed consent is a “compulsory element” of ethics (my own term) in the practice of psychology, both in providing individual services and complying with ethical research procedures (see HIMPSI2010; APA2002). The concept of informed consent originates from biomedical treatment procedures but has become normative in many research procedures, including social science research. Informed consent aims to ensure that the purpose and impact of the research procedure have been explained to the subject and permission to participate in the research process has been given. For research participants, informed consent is useful in order to understand the context, topic, and aims of the research, their rights and obligations as participants, and also the risks as well as any compensation involved. For researchers, informed consent usually guarantees that participation was voluntary and engaged in without duress (Riessman2005; Jackson2003; Bowling2002; Flick2002; Kazdin1992; Fowler 1988). I was concerned about complying with the ethical rule that informed consent
be in written form because this procedure had the tendency to be misunderstood in the context of our research. After the disaster, there had been cases of misuse of aid and issues about fairness that had resulted in some of our interviewees misinterpreting signatures as giving consent to use what they said as witness statements against other villagers.
Among the Indonesian researchers, we discussed the concrete detail of partic-ipants’ consent statements in order to make them more contextual. In discussion between the Indonesian and German teams, we agreed that informed consent empha-sized obtaining permission and statements of willingness from the research subjects.
We also talked about the ethical constraints involved and that it was important that these were genuinely understood by participants. Finally, we reached an understand-ing that consent could be given verbally and that an audio recordunderstand-ing of the statement before the interview was conducted would be sufficient. Stressing the formal and official procedure of using written documents would have resulted in mistrust, due to the above-mentioned history. There was, in fact, one refusal of an interview be-cause the potential interviewee believed that the interview would be used to prove the misconduct of other villagers. Understanding the context of the participants’ ex-periences greatly influenced decisions about the best means by which participants could give their free and informed consent.
6.3 Maintaining Confidentiality: Anonymity in the Context of a Communal Society
The research participants continue to live in a communal–collectivist culture, which is traditional to Javanese life. This communal–collectivist character is found in daily habits, such as families living as extended families rather than as nuclear families, which is also very apparent during celebrations such as marriages, births of new family members, or funerals (see Chap. 10). There are various values and related practices that reinforce this communality or togetherness, such as gotong royong (voluntary work together in the community) and some common phrases, such as mangan ora mangan asal kumpul (the main thing is being together, even when there is no food, because the most important thing is the togetherness). People know each other very well, for example, when I first began to seek out one or two villagers to be interviewed (based on certain criteria), and the person was not at home, a neighbor would explain to me where that person had gone, with whom, and could even predict how long that person would be away. Not surprisingly, the line between private or personal space is often unclear. Having been brought up in this type of environment, I was able to fully understand the importance placed on being involved in the daily life of and caring for each other and one’s neighbors in the villages we investigated.
In the context of these communal bonds, there appeared to be potential for con-tradictions in response to the need for anonymity in research. For example, it was often very difficult to convince an interviewee to participate in an interview alone, in a private place without any neighbors or members of the extended family present.
Being interviewed alone made some participants uncomfortable, as indicated by the subjects themselves saying that there was nothing they were trying to hide. This condition was also experienced by Riesmann (2005). In these contradictory circum-stances, I felt blocked but when interviewing villagers in the presence of others, forms of social control also inhibited respondents to talk openly (at least negatively) about members of the village elite and the village committee. In this type of interview context, topics such as irregularities in aid distribution were avoided. However, if I had insisted on conducting the interview in private, suspicion might have arisen and I could potentially have exposed the interviewee to negative consequences or punishment by powerful people in the village.
My response was to move my interviews in the direction of chatting. To protect my interviewees, I even tended to delay the interview and avoid certain topics. After the initial meeting, I would propose a new appointment, hoping to be able to meet him or her in a private setting with no one around, and to be able to explain the concept of informed consent.
Control of the situation varied between the different villages; for example, in one village we experienced control exerted by the village committee. In this context, the Indonesian research team tried to influence the conditions in the villages. The attempts to maintain anonymity focused on not only making the research participants more assertive but also deterring the village committees from intervening and thereby threatening the anonymity of the participants. In order to achieve this, we took on the role of educating and raising awareness about anonymity in the context of research with people in rural villages. We were aware that we could not change the hierarchical power structures in the villages. An important point for us was to understand the meaning of anonymity from the participants’ perspective within the sociocultural context of the villages in our study.
6.4 Research Data: Usage and Ownership Issues
This research resulted in interviews and observation data. There were some sec-ondary data used including village demographics and other information from the village or subdistrict administration, institutions or departments, and also from the media. Through the process of obtaining informed consent, the research data actually become the researcher’s property, though special permission is needed if the data will explicitly show the subject’s identity (for example, in photos or videos) (Van den Eynden et al.2011). There was an instance in which a survivor who had been physically disabled as a result of the earthquake initially refused and then subse-quently gave permission to use a photograph of him in a publication. In this case, I learned how important it is to understand the context within which a person refuses or gives permission. The respondent had been disappointed by a reconstruction helper who had not shown him respect and had made him feel left behind. Because of a discussion of this past event of not having been respected by the helper, he helped me understand the reasons behind the initial refusal of permission to use his photo.
An in-depth conversation on this previous experience was crucial for the subsequent permission. Participants have their own world of experiences and perspectives that affects their decisions.
Another interesting experience was related to conducting participatory research with the community in the third year. What is the property or ownership status of research data produced in a participative manner? The participatory research conducted in the third year included research cooperation between the research team and the villagers. The research data “property rights” became an ethical topic of special interest: as the villagers were the ones doing the research and the role of the Indonesian team was more to assist the process, the real primary owner of the data was actually the village researchers. Interestingly, the village researchers felt that they were not researchers, but rather just people who were involved in this program.
They felt that the research belonged to us, the professional researchers from the Indonesian/German research team. I believe we have to realize that in conducting participatory research, the researchers consist of two parties and this means that research results are owned by both parties with equal rights and obligations. As researchers, we need to maintain ethical practices, namely by encouraging the people to own and to have power over their research results. Building awareness of their rights and empowering them to own the research data that they help to create are two of our central responsibilities as researchers.
6.5 Concluding Remarks: Lessons Learned
This chapter has given me the chance to reflect on the ethical concerns involved in my interactions with participants as a researcher during the 3 years of the research project. The most basic insight resulted from reflecting upon variations in distance and closeness between my research participants and me, in the roles of researcher, fellow survivor, and fellow Javanese. The well-being of both researcher and par-ticipants could benefit from these insights. Reflecting on ethical, moral, and power issues may also create uncertainty that leads to internal conflicts. However, becom-ing aware of one’s own position in the research field affects the power relationship between the researcher and subject because it enables the researcher to act differently.
Another issue arose around concerns about ethical conduct according to Western or international perspectives. The Indonesian Psychological Association (HIMPSI 2010) tried to make guidelines for Indonesian professional conduct to conform with Western rules. However, when actually applying these adapted rules to a sociocultural context, such as a post-disaster rural setting, local conditions (and knowledge) must be taken into consideration. If it is crucial to maintain the subjects’ well-being, then it is important to build a positive, respectful relationship with the participants based on mutual trust and an empathetic understanding of their situation. Researchers can do this by understanding the main ideas for ethical research practice beyond the formalized techniques and rules by adapting these ideals and aspirations to local practice. The goal is not just to reduce the complexities of ethical conduct in the
data-gathering process, but also to bring a positive feeling to the researcher as well as the participants. The combination of an Indonesian team in a position of closeness to the research field and a German team’s outsider perspective resulted in many productive discussions.
Some suggestions regarding ethical practices for future research in disaster or Indonesian contexts include:
• To be aware of and open toward the special characteristics of participants. The researcher should not only consider the ideas or information that would be bene-ficial for analysis (as a background for research to be conducted) but should also adapt views of ethical conduct to the specific sociocultural context.
• It is an advantage to have the perspectives of insiders and outsiders in a research team, particularly when the team is international. International collaboration when conducting research offers the opportunity to better understand the participants in their context. This not only benefits the research data, but also helps maintain the well-being of participants. A “local researcher” who is close to the world of the participants is crucial in the transformation of perspectives of “outsiders” and helps in reducing bias and producing valid interpretations .
Acknowledgments The editors would like to thank Elise Serbaroli for her assistance in editing this chapter.
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