Principles, Approaches and Issues in Participant Observation by Danny L. Jorgensen

Author:Danny L. Jorgensen [Jorgensen, Danny L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367415303
Google: HartygEACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-02-28T01:39:28+00:00

Dilemmas and controversies

Over about the last forty-some years applied ethics has become a growth industry (see, for instance, Adler and Adler, 2003; Johnson and Altheide, 2003; Denzin and Giardina, 2007). This trend of deliberating about ethics in government, business, engineering, sciences, technology, the professions, and many other aspects of human existence is in many significant ways necessary, important, and highly laudable. Yet, the logic whereby the biomedical model has come to define ethical orthodoxy, enforced by official organizations and agents on human studies research, unfortunately often is misguided and inappropriate (Douglas, 1979; Mitchell, 1993; Christians, 2000; Haggerty, 2004; Lincoln, 2005; Dingwall, 2008; Hammersley, 2009; King et al., 2018; Traianou, 2019; Schrag, 2019).

Simply put, the logic of applying biomedical ethics to human studies is something like this: German physicians and scientists under the influence of the Nazis engaged in horrific and unforgivable abuses of human beings in the name of science (usually without mention of the American development and use of atomic bombs on Japanese civilian populations); there subsequently were a variety of documented instances where the American government engaged in and/or supported scientific experiments with human subjects in which people were severely damaged, physically and psychologically, such as the Tuskegee syphilis study; an ethical code therefore is required to prevent these abuses of human beings in the name of scientific research.

Following the controversy over Milgram’s studies of obedience, the biomedical model was extended to behavioral science research. The effort to protect the subjects of biomedical experimentation from physical abuse thereby was expanded rather uncritically to psychological harm and, by further extension, to most any kind of damage (reputational, social, economic) that might result from scholarly research. Whether or not Milgram’s research was ethical, the damage it caused subjects was in no way comparable to the harm caused by biomedical research. Then, following controversies mostly over deceptive and covert participant observation (as discussed below), the biomedical model was extended further to include most any form of scholarly research involving living human beings.

Lost in this last step of the argument was much of any indication that anyone was damaged by covert participant observation or other forms of qualitative investigation. What allegedly is unethical about covert participant observation is that it violates certain featured principles of biomedical ethics, not that it is harmful. Over the entire history of participatory research in human studies—a period of more than a hundred years—there is very little evidence that people were harmed seriously even in the most notorious cases cited most frequently (Mitchell, 1993). Many aspects of urban life in America today—such as breathing polluted air, walking in a city park, driving to work, eating fast-food, or even cooking out in the backyard—are much more likely to result in serious injury (physically and psychologically) than being involved in participant observational research.

It is even more ironic and unjustified that the impetus for uniformly enforcing biomedical ethics by way of IRBs is at the initiative of the US government (or those in other Western countries)—the very same entity that

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