Research from the Heart: Friendship and Compassion as Personal Research Values

ABSTRACT

This article reflects on the author’s efforts to center friendship and compassion as in research that is highly personal and intimate, as well as on the ways that friendship and compassion, as research values, can sit in tension with university research ethics board (REB) approval processes. The article includes three research case studies to explore how procedural ethics review by REBs overlooks certain types of research harms and obscures the important role of relationships in determining research outcomes. The article concludes with a call for research from the heart.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist research ethics
• relational research ethics
• compassionate research
• qualitative research ethics
• friendship as research

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As an archival studies scholar, I use recordkeeping as a term that encompasses acts of record creation, use, organization and preservation by records creators and by archivists and other records professionals.

2 While archival donors can set restrictions on public access to collections or parts of collections, usually for a set period of time (e.g. until ten years past the death of the donor or twenty-five years from the time of donation), thereby controlling access to particularly private or intimate records, there are other ways sensitive material may be inadvertently made available; record collections are often large and cover wide swaths of time so that even their creators may be unaware of what is documented and preserved in them. Even the most controlled archives can contain areas of wilderness.

3 Regarding attention to research team needs in ‘emotionally demanding research’ see for example: Kumar and Cavallaro (2018), Rager (2005), Tilley (2003).

4 See also Hollway and Jefferson’s (2013) discussion of ‘psychosocial subjects’ and the ways in which ‘unconscious intersubjective dynamics’ affect the co-creation of meaning in qualitative interviewing.

5 This type of sharing is not appropriate in every research relationship, and many research questions can be answered without it. Researcher sharing in interviews can also be problematic. For nuanced discussions of researcher disclosure in qualitative interviewing see for example Miller (2017); Harris (2015); Ellis and Burger (2002).

6 The principle of relationality in Indigenous research methods has significantly impacted my thinking about friendship in research, but more broadly underscores the urgent need for reciprocal, respectful and accountable research in and with over-researched populations and in particular with and in Indigenous communities. On relationality in Indigenous research methodology see also Kovach 2017; Kovach 2021; Archibald 2008.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: [Grant Number 430-2018-00182].

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Douglas

Jennifer Douglas lives and works on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) people. She is an assistant professor in the School of Information, University of British Columbia, where she teaches courses on personal archives, archival arrangement and description, and archival research and scholarship. Her research interests include personal and intimate archives, the emotional dimensions of archival work, person-centered approaches to archival theory and practice, and archival representation and its histories.