Ethical issues

My dissertation points on ethical issues must include:

• Dignity, welfare, do no harm
• Care taken to do no harm. Participants and organisations confidentiality respected.
• Data accurately collected and reported
• Permission to conduct research in the manner adopted was gained from the OU ethics committee
• Interviewees and organisations were informed of the nature of the research and given the right to anonymity, offered the chance to withdraw or discontinue participation, given written details of how their details would be stored and used and asked to indicate their agreement
• At the interview stage, interviewees were sent or given a copy of the information sheet and an informed consent form. The form was discussed and collected at the beginning of the interview. The form gave the option of separately giving or refusing permission for the recording of interview. The interviewees were given anonymity in the thesis and in the NVivo files by the use of pseudonyms.

Insecurity

This is such an insecure activity – looking for access.

The ethics committee told me to create an information sheet, which I’ve done, and my supervisors weren’t interested immediately but now have commented that they wouldn’t have written it like this, so I’ve got amendments to make. and my supervisors say that they’d write the email differently and so on.

I'm finding complying with the OU ethics committee on one hand and the need to get access on the other sometimes incompatible. On the one hand, I find example information sheets that cover everything, but on the other hand, such sheets might

1. scare off potential participants
2. be too simplistic for the intelligent business people that I hope to speak to.

For example, my supervisor found the wording that

"researchers are not allowed to persuade people to participate"

'rather bizarre'. And I agree. Why shouldn't I try to get people to participate? In the long run, the research should benefit more than just me.

Still no access

It's fourteen days since I sent my first request hoping for access. It's only fourteen days. And I've got another year and 49 weeks to finish my PhD. But I haven't yet spoken to anyone, had a conversation with anyone, or a phone call with anyone. But then again, I've contacted four people this week, and it's early days yet.

So I yo-yo between worrying and being sanguine. I know students who took all year to get their access for qualitative data, and one is still struggling. Studies on sensitive topics, like ethics of marketing, ("I heard you got told off for your advert so can I come and interview you?") and how someone fits into an organisation ("You're a bit odd - can we talk?") don't get access easily.

I don't have ethics committee issues, I'm not going to say nasty things about the organisation and I don't think my research topic is very sensitive. I just want to know how they do it, work with consultants.

Ethics

I was reading Mason's advice on qualitative design when I came across her advice on ethics too. She advises on layout - use a table with rows for each research question and headings for data sources, justification for using those sources, practicalities and consequent ethical issues. Then she has a chapter on each type of qualitative data source, like observation or interview, with advice on the possible ethical issues. So it's quite thought provoking.

Research questions	Data sources and methods	Justification	Practicalities (e.g. resources, access, skills)	Ethical issues [1]

I need also be aware of the ESRC framework held here.

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[1] Taken from Mason, J. (2002) Qualitative researching, (2nd ed Edn), Sage, London. 973

Supervision

Today's supervision meeting has brought things together - good, because we haven't met for a couple of months. Things were in my mind, like getting the interview questions together and the ethics approval, and now we've discussed them together I feel that this is the time to write them. So I have three things to write:

1. set of interview questions
2. ethics proposal
3. a draft to the head of a consultancy firm to get that perspective on my research.

I'd written on engagement, I'd written three drafts, and presented the last one to my supervisors at the last minute. (Sup #2 likes the structure and that's a first! :)) Sup #2 knows now where I'm going with engagement and why. He suggests I read the collaborative literature, and he's right, but I just wouldn't have got round to it for ages if he hadn't said it. So I've reading to do too.

And dates to negotiate for cases.

BTW, I took along a table of the search terms and databases I had used for engagement. Supervisor #1 was happy with this approach, evidence that could fit in an appendix for my PhD eventually. Why did I have such a table? Because I'd been to that systematic review of the literature at the BAM conference, where I felt encouraged to record and tabulate what literature I'd searched for and found. Supervisor also kept looking at the table I'd done of a thematic analysis of the literature - something I'd seen in a couple of the Cranfield papers that I mentioned here, here and here.

Perhaps I have reviewed something systematically.

Advice

I've had feedback from the ethics chap. He points out that

1. my supervisors have to endorse the ethics application
2. the research question might need to be "rather more focused and explicit"

So oh yeuch! Supervisors aren't around for weeks, (see the PhD comic on elusive supervisors) and ethics applications take perhaps a month to get through, and I hoped to know enough about what I was doing by September to start on a pilot project.

And yeah! I'm writing something now so that I can get this darned research question focused and explicit.

Back to the writing desk!

Ethics approval

I thought I'd apply now for ethics approval for my research. It gives me something concrete and simple to do and getting the approval may take ages, but asking may also get me some advice on the project.

So I've done the form, an example covering letter and emailed it for advice.