Doing Qualitative Research Differently: A Psychosocial Approach by Wendy Hollway & Tony Jefferson

Author:Wendy Hollway & Tony Jefferson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781446290163
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2012-11-11T14:00:00+00:00

Is there a limit to the issue of consent?

There are occasions when consent is not the primary ethical principle, but is contradicted by another. In the Watergate example above, this principle is the public interest. There are many other occasions when one ethical principle is contradicted by another. In certain areas of social-science research – areas involving illicit activities of various kinds, for example – informed consent is neither possible nor desirable. To get the research done at all, deception, in the form of covert research may sometimes be necessary (we shall have more to say on this below). In our particular example, a contested rape case, it is hard to imagine both parties, with their different stories, consenting to have their accounts ‘refereed’ (as it must seem to them) by a ‘disinterested’ third party: there is too much at stake. They need advocates to advance their interests, not researchers to question them. In this context, then, asking for consent is likely to be a pointless exercise.

The ability to say ‘no’ can be a powerful one in the research process and can be enough to counteract the otherwise powerful institutional and educational resources of the researcher. In our particular case, for the reasons given above, our retrospective attempt to secure consent to our project foundered on the silence of one party and the objections of the other’s representative. Should we have allowed the implicit ‘no’ of one key participant to jeopardise the project when we considered the objections to be insufficient to warrant what would have amounted to self-censorship? We were wanting to voice ideas that were not getting an airing in the debate on ‘date-rape’ and which in our view were needed. Wherein should the power of veto lie, especially in contentious areas of public debate in which, by definition, disagreement is endemic? To give participants the power of veto over the re-analysis of the public accounts of their motives and actions would seem to be giving up on a founding idea of democracy, namely, free speech. Surely this cannot be what the guidelines intend?

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