The relationship between ethical positions and methodological approaches: a Scandinavian perspective

Abstract

In this article, based on reading ethnographic theses, books and articles and conversations with nine key informants, we have tried to describe how research ethics are approached and written about in educational ethnography in Scandinavia. The article confirms findings from previous research that there are different methodological forms of ethnography there. It adds that although ethical descriptions can of course be described by using formal-philosophical ethical-typographies there is also a relationship between ethical holdings and methodological approaches. The different approaches reflect critical, feminist, interactionist and micro-ethnographic forms. The ethical types have been termed utilitarian, deontological, relational and ecological. The main conclusions are that the research we have analysed has always considered ethical issues and that these considerations often in some sense reflect national ethical guidelines from research authorities and financiers. A drift can also be discerned away from utilitarian ethics to relational and ecological thinking in accordance with methodological and ideological commitments and beliefs.

Keywords:

• ethics
• methodology
• ethnography
• reflexivity

Notes

1. The research we have read has expressed recognition of the capacity of ethnography for capturing an in-depth view of day-to-day classroom life and that this creates its own ethical difficulties with no simple and easy solutions. Also suggested is that solutions to ethical problems relate to and largely reflect the nature of the relationship negotiated between researcher and researched (Malin 2003) and the navigation of difficult philosophical issues of truth, interpretation and responsibility (Lather 2006). What informants (and theses) seemed to be describing here were the importance of processes of construction of ethical positions and practices from within physical territories where the self and other are intimately related through interactions within networks of action involving artifacts, people, spaces and places in everyday life (Dennis 2009). For this reason Lather also argues for avoiding any resurgent positivistic standardisations of ethics, which seems thus to be a venture that is crafted similarly to artistic production (Beach 2010).

2. Staffan Larsson was one of the first Swedish educational ethnographers to write about ethics in relation to research values like validity. He lifted ethical values as in some senses in potential opposition with those of conventional science and spoke of the need to balance these demands or perhaps rethink them (Larsson, 1994, 171). By doing so he suggested a need to continually think about the relationship between commitments to science, practical values and ethical values, and added that commitments to ethics don't threaten validity. Rather there is a dialectic relationship between them (also Dennis 2009; Lather 2006).

3. In other words ethical responsibility lies in finding resolutions to situated dilemmas. Codes of ethics are recognised as having a role to play, but so too are other (even political and ideological) scientific values and commitments (Gewirtz and Cribb 2008). What is expressed is that researchers need to deal with ethical dilemmas based on choices that may be beyond the strictures of a priori frameworks. Bloom and Sawin (2009) have suggested that this holding is common in feminist research methodologies, which are thus able to offer a productive guide in regard to ethical thinking and practice. They call for researchers to negotiate research commitments more often and more seriously with research participants. Such things are also discussed in Liberman's (1999) writing about the need to craft out an ethical stance through an honest engagement with local communities that incorporates a commitment to theory with a willingness to respect the values of the other and allow epistemological space for research informants and other participants to act as subjects who are able to avoid objectification.

4. This critique of deontology comes from the conflict theoretical, critical and feminist perspectives in the research we have read for this article, such as Pedersen (2007) and Rajander (2009), and is reflected in comments and writing by researchers working from this and related perspectives (e.g., Beach 2002; Bloom and Sawin 2009; Lather 2006). The critique is that the deontological position doesn't supply acceptable workable practical alternatives to utilitarianism in complex, bureaucratic, class-based, gendered/gendering and racially stratified and divided societies, with their systems of linked differentiating institutions such as those of education that essentially work in ways that reproduce the intellectual and material conditions necessary for continued class, gender and racial exploitation (also Beach 1999).

5. Finnish feminist and (other) NordCrit ethnographers like Öhrn, Dovemark and Arnesson, are all openly committed to developing social justice and equality in education. They try to question and avoid the use of a disspassionate and distant voice and they problematise, as did Dorothy Smith (1987), the way ethnography can seem to (but really can't) ignore the part of the researcher, by recovering the object of knowledge of the research as if it stood simply by itself (Rajander 2009). In their research they try to balance personal, experiential and socially acceptable ways of knowing by reaching through spaces between the self and the other to appreciate both closeness, distance and new ways of knowing that interrogate both ‘who I am [and] who am I exploring’ (Thesis 5, Finland).