Abstract
Universities, funders and professional bodies now have well-developed ethics policies and procedures in place to ensure research participants are fully informed and safeguarded and institutional reputational damage is prevented. These codes have coalesced around increasingly standardised core criteria, with the expectation that they will be adhered to by all employed and funded researchers. This chapter argues however that the dominance of standardised ethics frameworks is also problematic. Both qualitative and quantitative investigations inevitably involve researchers making ethics judgements which are relative and context specific as well. These judgements may be complex, and the outcomes they produce do not always align with standardised ethics frameworks. Drawing on six examples selected from our own research on labour migration and workplace exploitation, in particular on forced labour among migrant workers, we discuss the need to identify and reappraise the distinction between achieving ethical research ‘on paper’ (conformance with institutional ethics codes) and actually defining and ensuring ethical research in practice (i.e. allowing space for exercising individual ethics judgments).
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | ETHICAL CONCERNS IN RESEARCH ON HUMAN TRAFFICKING |
Pages | 117-135 |
Number of pages | 19 |
Volume | 13 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 9 Dec 2015 |
Publication series
Name | Studies of Organized Crime |
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Keywords
- Community Research
- Ethics
- Exploitation
- Forced Labour
- Interview
- Migration
- Peer Research
- Qualitative
- Research
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Geddes, Alistair
- Energy Environment and Society - Senior Lecturer (Teaching and Research)
Person: Academic