Ethical Issues in Researching Black Teenage Mothers with Harmful Childhood Histories: Marginal Voices

Abstract

This paper highlights a number of ethical dilemmas encountered in a pilot study with a hard-to-reach group of research participants with harmful childhood histories. Drawing on a project exploring black teenage mothers' understandings of their own childhood experiences of abuse, it is argued that in asking young mothers to talk about such an emotionally sensitive topic as their own harmful childhood, a number of challenges are posed about how to deal with number of key ethical principles. The paper begins by outlining the context of the pilot study, including the research literature on this subject. It then discusses three key ethical principles that were considered during the process of the research: issues of gaining consent; and when the principle of confidentiality ought to be breached when a duty of care prerogative emerges. The paper explores these tensions in operationalising these principles when dealing with the competing needs and rights of gatekeepers, the young women and their carers, using occasional extracts from research findings to illustrate these tensions. The paper concludes with a discussion of the ethical challenges in accessing marginal voices in social research.

Keywords:

• Research Ethics
• Teenage Mothers
• Consent
• Duty of Care
• Confidentiality

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank BASPCAN for the funding for this project. The author also thanks the anonymous reviewers and Professor Jim Campbell for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

¹This competency is used to consider the ability of children and young people under the age of 16 to give informed consent. It originally addressed the question of the rights of children/young people under the age of 16 to consent to treatment on their own behalf and was reviewed by the courts in 1985, in connection with contraception. This principle has been extended beyond consent to medical treatment and has been used in subsequent legislation, for example the Children Act (1989).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Claudia Bernard

Claudia Bernard is Head of Postgraduate Studies in the Department of Professional and Community Education at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research interests lie in investigating the intersection of race, gender, social class, and child and family welfare