Explore – Smartphone-based Activities: Put your investigative skills to the test with these quick interactive activities. Dig deeper into key concepts and understand how they might relate to your own research project via guided website searches and online discussion questions.

5.1 Student ethics

Go online and google ‘research ethics’. How relevant is this to your own research? Now look at this paper:

Guimaraes, E. (2007). I. Feminist Research Practice: Using Conversation Analysis to Explore the Researcher’s Interaction with Participants. Feminism & Psychology, 17(2), 149–161.

Based on her own PhD research on sexual abuse in Brazil, Estefania Guimares shows how ethical issues enter into the nitty gritty activity of collecting data.

Does what you found in your google search fit with Estefania’s discussion of research ethics in her project?

5.2 Concealing Your Identity

Look online for information about what information you should give to the people you are studying. According to what you have read, what do you want to inform your study participants about?

Now read this paper:

Marzano, M. (2007). Informed Consent, Deception, and Research Freedom in Qualitative Research. Qualitative Inquiry, 13(3), 417–436.

Sometimes we need to conceal our identity in order to research a particular setting. In this paper, based on his own research in a cancer hospital, Marco Marzano considers when it is appropriate to use concealment and when it should be abandoned. Marco’s paper shows, we always need to relate ethical decisions to the context which we are studying