SAGE Journal Articles

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Baez, B. (2002). Confidentiality in Qualitative Research: Reflections on Secrets, Power and Agency. Qualitative Research, 2(1): 35–58.

This article makes a philosophical case for recharacterizing confidentiality in qualitative research from static notions of harm and privacy to one that accounts for a critical agency which exposes, subverts and redefines oppressive social structures. Confidentiality protects secrecy, which hinders transformative political action. Transformative political action requires that researchers and respondents consider themselves involved in a process of exposing and resisting hegemonic power arrangements, but such action is thwarted by secrecy and the methods used to protect it. This article suggests that in order for qualitative research to be transformative the convention of confidentiality must be questioned.

Flicker, S., Haans, D., Skinner, H. (2004). Ethical Dilemmas in Research on Internet Communities. Qualitative Health Research, 14 (1), pp. 124-134.

There has been a rapid growth in the number of articles using Internet data sources to illuminate health behavior. However, little has been written about the ethical considerations of online research, especially studies involving data from Internet discussion boards. Guidelines are needed to ensure ethical conduct. In this article, the authors examine how a youthfocused research program negotiated ethical practices in the creation of its comprehensive health site and online message board. They address three situations in which ethical predicaments arose: (a) enrolling research participants, (b) protecting participants from risk or harm, and (c) linking public and private data. Drawing on the ethical principles of autonomy, nonmaleficence, justice, and beneficence, the authors present practical guidelines for resolving ethical dilemmas in research on Internet communities.

Goffman, A. (2009). On the run: Wanted men in a Philadelphia ghetto. American Sociological Review. Vol 74 (June: 339–357).

Although recent increases in imprisonment are concentrated in poor Black communities, we know little about how daily life within these neighborhoods is affected. Almost all ethnographic work in poor minority neighborhoods was written before the expansion of the criminal justice system, and the bulk of research on “mass imprisonment” relies on survey data, field experiments, or interviews, conceptualizing its impact in terms of current or former felons and their families. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in Philadelphia, this article shifts the focus from imprisonment and criminal records to the increase in policing and supervision in poor Black neighborhoods, and what this has meant for a growing status group of wanted people. For many young men, avoiding jail has become a daily preoccupation: they have warrants out for minor infractions, like failing to pay court fees or breaking curfew, and will be detained if they are identified. Such threat of imprisonment transforms social relations by undermining already tenuous attachments to family, work, and community. But young men also rely on their precarious legal standing to explain failures that would have occurred anyway, while girlfriends and neighbors exploit their wanted status as an instrument of social control. I discuss the implications of my ethnographic observations relative to prior treatments of the poor and policing, and with regard to broader sociological questions about punishment and surveillance in the modern era.

Huber, J., & Clandinin, D. (2002). Ethical Dilemmas in Relational Narrative Inquiry with Children. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(6): 785–803.

In the fall of a school year, the authors began work in an elementary inner-city school. Positioned as teacher researchers, they spent the year in a 3/4 classroom. Their inquiry intentions were to more fully understand the experiences of children, families, and teachers of diverse backgrounds as they engaged with each other in the school. They are experienced researchers who have worked with adults, teachers, teacher educators, and principals as coresearchers in other relational narrative inquiries. The authors imagined negotiating similar coresearcher relationships with children. However, as they worked to negotiate coresearcher relationships with children, they encountered new relational inquiry complexities. In this article, the authors explore these complexities and make explicit four tensions they experienced in the study. They suggest a need for negotiating an ethic of relational narrative inquiry alongside children as coresearchers.