Part 3 Summary of Findings, Conclusions and
5.5 Ethical Concerns and Considerations
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request, followed by informal discussions. A formal meeting was held on 9 July 2008, at which point the director informed me that my letter had been discussed in a staff meeting and invited me to temporarily fill a position due to become vacant on 31 July 2008. The main challenges with regard to this site confronted me only at the point of publishing my findings.
Given the refugee services provider’s distinctiveness, it would not be difficult for readers, especially of the article Assuming Responsibility for Justice (Chapter 10), to figure out the organisation concerned. The potential harm was foreseeable, and I raised the issue at different points of data collection both with the organisation’s director and with staff. I asked all staff members at the refugee services organisation to consent individually to participate in the study, and indeed, one colleague withheld consent and could not be referred to. In addition, when writing the publication, my co-authors and I decided to rely on my personal experiences rather than those narrated by others (hence the decision not to use any of the depth individual interviews), and where the cited field notes referred to colleagues, I sought to disguise their identities as best as possible. Finally, in the methodology section of the publication we were explicit about how we intended the article to be read, that is, in a spirit of a shared, forward-looking responsibility (see Chapter 10.4.3).
The situation at the second research site was also complex. I had been approached to assist when the church leadership faced difficulties in managing an unprecedented crisis of displacement. Even though gatekeeper consent was requested formally, and the church executive was involved in granting it, I cannot be sure that everyone felt there was choice in the matter. I, too, felt unable to refuse to become involved; and I needed to collect data.
Ultimately, only time allowed me to glean the extent to which there was genuine consent (Hugman 2010b). I conclude that as far as church leadership and staff were concerned, the climate was one of general consent since I was allowed access to an empty office from which to work well into 2010, and a further two staff members agreed to participate in depth individual interviews in September 2011.
The situation concerning individual members of the congregation was even more challenging.
Gobo (2008) considers gatekeeper consent sufficient grounds for ethical practice. Yet, Hugman (2010b) cautions that because of the service context and the researcher’s multiple roles, the use of ethnographic methods in practice settings gives rise to intricate, and
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comprehensive power differentials between the social worker/researcher and the service users/research participants. Hugman (2010b:157) cautions that,
It seems difficult to be sure that the relationship between staff and their service users ... does not create an implicit ‘compulsion’ to give consent [to participating in research while receiving – or in the hope of receiving better – services]. Similarly, the researcher’s identity as a social worker ... might also ... [encourage] greater disclosure ... In response, reflexive checking that pays attention to such ethical questions is part of good quality methodology (brackets, added).
This argument can be extended to include those members of the church community for whom my dual role of fellow congregant/researcher might have made it difficult to express dissent.
Following the completion of the data collection, I developed a sense of ethical discomfort about the absence of explicit consent from congregational members and thought of ways to ameliorate the situation. In January 2011, before embarking on writing the first article, Encountering the Other (Chapter 8), I invited the congregation at large to attend an open presentation and discussion of my preliminary findings. Individuals – both members of the refugee group and of the receiving community – who expressed a particular interest, were asked to comment on the first drafts of Encountering the Other and Reflections on Misframing (Chapter 9). To all others, I extended an open-ended invitation to read and give input on the write-up of findings. These kinds of activities are normally regarded as measures to enhance the trustworthiness of a study (see Section 5.6) rather than a matter of ethics. However, the fact that fellow congregants were afforded opportunities to express disapproval of particular findings, or object to featuring in the articles, entailed the chance to express dissent, even if in a restricted and post-hoc manner. My final ethical ‘backstops’ were to disguise the identities of all individual congregants referred to in the publications so that particular statements or actions would be difficult to trace back to specific persons and to include my own actions in all critical reflections on the church’s responses to the refugees who had been hosted.
5.5.3 Ethical Concerns Relating to Participating Cross-border Migrants
The participating cross-border migrants were the most vulnerable among the study’s participants: Miller (2000) stresses that giving a life history can be a traumatic experience at the best of times, but the data collection and analysis confirmed that without exception, all
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cross-border migrants involved in the study had been, and still were, exposed to both traumatic and stressful life circumstances. The ethical responsibilities flowing from this pertained to all cross-border migrants in the study, not only those who had consented to participating in the life stories. In addition to Hugman’s (2010b) concerns about the power differentials that can result from a participant observer/social worker’s multiple roles in practice setting, Hugman, Eileen Pittaway and Linda Bartolomei (2011:7) found that across a number of studies with refugees, participation was often ‘based on mis-apprehension of the research process’. They conclude that in order to avoid harm therefore, it is important that,
The relationship between ... researcher and participants is based on a process and not seen as a single event. It must involve dialogue in all aspects ... of the research (Hugman, Pittaway and Bartolomei 2011:7).
In the context of my work at the refugee services organisation, the majority of service users were short term clients, hence my relationships with them were limited to once- or twice-off events. At the beginning of the interview, I informed each and every person of my dual roles as social worker and researcher, asking if she or he preferred to be seen by a colleague instead. Nobody made use of this opportunity which is unsurprising in the context of the organisation’s fast-paced work and the continued sense of crisis in the months following the xenophobic violence. At the church, the engagement with participant cross-border migrants lasted for months, giving me greater opportunity to try and mitigate the possibility of unethical research relationships (see Chapter 8.4). In the life story interviews, I had ongoing relationships with all participants whom I had known between three months and eight years.
Follow-up interviews took place between nine days and six months after the preceding session. This provided the opportunity for respondents to reflect on whether or not to continue participating. Importantly, it allowed us to talk about the impact of the interview and to provide debriefing where necessary. Even though none of the participants in the life story interviews required this, one member of the group requested referral for additional counselling, and I was able to make this referral.
Finally, it has become acceptable practice in life history research to fictionalise aspects of the accounts to protect participants and others – so long as the revised account stays as close as possible to the original one, and the subjective meaning behind the story is preserved (Miller, 2000). This was necessary in a few instances only, and was done jointly with the research participants. All participants in the life story interviews had access to their interview
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transcripts; and those interested also had occasion to read, engage with, and provide feedback on preliminary findings as a matter of both trustworthiness and ethical research practice (Kelly 2006c). I discuss this and other considerations of trustworthiness next.