Researching Researchers: Lessons for Research Ethics

Abstract
There is widespread debate about ethical practice in social research.  Research practice in medical sociology is constrained, to some extent, by the need for approval by NHS Research Ethics Committees and, increasingly, University Ethics Committees as well as professional guidelines.  However, these constraints do not address all the ethical decisions researchers have to resolve during the process of research.  In this presentation, we draw on research conducted on an ESRC-funded study of informed consent in social research.  The study involved conducting focus groups and telephone interviews with researchers working in the broad areas of health and childhood research to explore how issues of informed consent are managed by researchers working with groups commonly identified as ‘vulnerable’. 

Researchers’ knowledge of the ‘tricks of the trade’ and our wish to demonstrate respect for our peers raised a number of ethical issues in the process of the research. Conducting research amongst our peers on the topic of ethics made us, and our study participants, particularly sensitive to these issues and we explore them here to highlight the implications they have for research with other groups.  We report on three interrelated issues.  The first relates to issues of confidentiality and the desirability of study participants amending their interview/focus group transcripts.  The second relates to issues of anonymity and the advantages and disadvantages of study participants being identified in research publications.  The third relates to issues of ownership of data and consent.  The responses of participants and the management of these issues will be discussed.

Introduction
There is considerable literature in methods textbooks on the power dynamics inherent in relationships between researchers and participants and the impact this can have on data quality (See Fontana & Frey, 1998). Power dynamics may involve the researcher in a more junior position to the people being researched (eg Foster, 1999), so called researching ‘up’ and, more commonly, studies which are concerned with researchers researching less powerful groups (e.g., Lawton, 2001; Ensign, 2003).   There is a growing trend in some areas of research, particularly in research with children and young people and people with mental health problems, to use ‘peer researchers’ as interviewers in order to avoid the problem of power differentials and this is part of a growing trend to involve end users in the research process (Christiansen & Prout, 2002; Hanley et al, 2003).  Less common are studies which involve academic and professional researchers researching their peers, although some studies have been conducted involving research with other academics such as studies of undergraduate assessment and examination (Platt, 1981), PhD supervision (Scott, 1985; Coffey and Atkinson, 1996), and of manager-academics (Deem, 2002).  These studies too may involve power differentials in that it is frequently junior researchers who collect data in such studies (Scott, 1985; Deem, 2002).  Studies conducted by academic or professional researchers of their peers raise specific ethical issues which are not distinct from those inherent in all research but which arguably place researchers in a situation where they have increased sensitivity to some ethical issues such as confidentiality.  We want to explore some of the practical and ethical issues raised by research with peers and to explore the lessons this has for research ethics more broadly.

The study
Before moving on to explore these issues, we will first outline the research study on which this paper is based.  This paper draws on a research project, entitled ‘Informed Consent and the Research Process’ which is funded as part of the ESRC Research Methods Programme. The project is in the final stages and is nearing completion.  The rationale for undertaking the project is the increased attention that is being paid to the issue of informed consent in research, not least because of the broad changes that are taking place in research governance and regulation in the UK and the increasingly legally-oriented frameworks within which academic and social research organisations have to work. The focus of the study is to explore researchers’ views and experiences of managing informed consent with the aim of developing resources for use by the social science community and encouraging debate on the topic. 

The project involved collecting data primarily through telephone interviews and focus groups with academic and non-academic researchers and focuses specifically, but not exclusively, on researchers who conduct qualitative research on or with children, young people, older people, people receiving palliative care, people with learning disabilities and people with mental health problems. The focus on these particular areas of research was made because of the assumed vulnerability of members of these groups within the research process, although we would argue that our study has implications for consent in social research more generally.  Thirty-one individual telephone interviews were conducted with experienced researchers with reputations for work in these specific areas (n=24) or in research ethics more broadly (n=7).  These individual ‘experts’ were identified through our own knowledge of the area, recommendations from other academics approached to participate, the literature and web searches.  The six focus groups were conducted in six academic institutions which had recognised expertise in each of the topic areas.  These groups comprised experienced researchers, academics and PhD students working in these broad areas (n= 36).  The interviews and focus groups were designed to elicit information from researchers relating to their views and practices around gaining informed consent from people involved in their research.  To supplement our data, the project website invited interested researchers to email us their views on these issues.  In addition, we emailed 33 researchers inviting them to respond by email to these specific issues and this generated more responses than the website’s general invitation for contributions.  The researchers contacted comprised those that we were unable to include in interviews or focus groups but would ideally have wanted to. To date we have had responses from nine of these individuals.

I will move on now to explore some of the practical and ethical issues in researching researchers, focusing primarily on our experiences of the processes involved in conducting the interviews and focus groups.

Practical issues in researching researchers
While researching researchers does not raise distinct ethical issues it does involve distinct practical issues which make the process for the researcher collecting data particularly problematic.  I will highlight three of these here that we encountered in this project.  The first concerns the power dynamics between researchers and researched.  In common with much other research conducted with academics (see, for example, Deem, 2002) we employed a research fellow to conduct the interviews and focus groups for our study, although in the case of the focus groups, one of the project grant-holders was also present as group observer.  In the case of the interviews, the researcher was supported by the study team who provided feedback on the interviews after reading the transcripts.  The interviews with ‘expert’ researchers (and to a lesser extent the focus groups) generally involved the research fellow in interviewing ‘up’ in that, as a junior researcher, she was interviewing senior, experienced researchers or academics who were well-known and respected in their specific fields.  The aim of the interviews and focus groups was to explore, and at times challenge, researchers’ views, experiences and attitudes about informed consent. This is a rather daunting task for a junior researcher, given the issues of power and hierarchy involved and the need to create a good impression of her research skills among the community within which she would want to work in the future.  The situation was managed by the research fellow by an approach she described as ‘informed deference’.  This involved her reading up on the work of individual researchers prior to the interview being conducted to enable her to be knowledgeable about their work in relation to the research topic and to ask appropriate questions but at the same time to defer to their expertise and knowledge in the ways that she explored and challenged their views on informed consent.  This was at times a difficult balance to achieve.  For example, some interviewees appeared to express different views in interviews to those expressed in papers they had published and this could be difficult to challenge.

The second issue concerns the difficulties of conducting research with a group of people who are expert in the practicalities of conducting research.  We found that researchers, particularly in the focus groups, were keen to demonstrate their knowledge of the research process by, for example, criticising the wording of study questions or checking that the research fellow was using the tape recorder appropriately.  At one of the focus groups prior to the group beginning, a participant told the research fellow that she had just completed some teaching sessions on how to run focus groups.  At the same focus group, as the session commenced, several of the researchers proceeded to ‘check’ the tape recorder to ensure that it was recording.  Although these actions were undoubtedly intended to be helpful to the research fellow who is collecting data, at the same time they can be experienced as rather undermining of a researcher’s skills and to provoke anxiety about performing appropriately in the researcher role in the presence of peers.

A third issue concerns data quality in such contexts, both in interviews and focus groups.  We found that researchers were keen to give what they perceived to be the ‘right’ answers (or at least not to give a ‘wrong’ answer), in an ethical sense, in relation to their management of informed consent.  This was particularly the case in focus groups where researchers of varying levels of experience and status were present (i.e., some focus groups comprised a professor from a department alongside junior researchers and PhD students from the same department).  When discussing informed consent, researchers tended to want to focus on the abstract principles of informed consent rather than to discuss the ways they managed these issues in their particular studies.  It was common for researchers to identify issues as ‘tricky’ and to be diffident in presenting their views, for example one researcher commented in response to a question about regulation in research:

Tricky, tricky. I don’t, I don’t have a fixed view on that’ (interview 6)

Another noted in response to a question about whether she used a particular ethical model for informing her decisions about ethics:

Well I think … I think that’s tricky, I mean I, that’s tricky, I think we get our ethical models from a range of places (interview 29)

We also found that in identifying ‘bad practice’, they tended to refer to other studies they had heard about rather than to discuss issues relating to their own research.  This is of course understandable but it meant that finding out what researchers actually did or, in some cases, felt was appropriate was rather difficult.  As the study progressed we found various ways in which we could ask questions to better ‘get at’ researchers’ experiences but nevertheless, the issue of identifying researchers’ private rather than public accounts of research practice is one that is particularly difficult and which presents a range of ethical dilemmas to which I will now turn.

Ethical issues in researching researchers
There are a number of different approaches to research ethics. In medical and health related research, rule or principle-based approaches tend to be used (Beauchamp & Childress, 2001; Seymour & Skilbeck, 2002).  These approaches are often enshrined, to some degree, in the guidelines that social researchers work to such as those produced by the Social Research Association (www.the-sra.org.uk/Ethicals.htm) and the British Sociological Association (www.britsoc.co.uk/library/ethicsguidelines2002.doc). However, guidelines for social researchers tend to be intentionally vague and leave researchers able to interpret them in ways that fit the needs of the specific research they are undertaking.  Many social researchers are critical of rule-based approaches and favour a ‘situational relativist’ approach (Plummer, 2001: 226-227; Small, 2001) in which ethical decisions are made on the basis of issues applicable to individual research projects. 

Regardless of the ethical approach that researchers use, the principles of confidentiality, anonymity and informed consent are regarded by most researchers as core elements of ethical practice, alongside related concerns such as the avoidance of deception, harm and exploitation. I will now move on to describe our method of obtaining consent from participants in order to explore the ethical issues thrown up by this research.

Consent
The research team involved in our project came from a range of backgrounds: from medical sociology and health research; from education and youth research; and, from community and family research.  The accepted norms in relation to informed consent differ broadly within different areas of research.  My own experience as a medical sociologist working on a wide range of health related research projects, and that of the project researcher, has been that of having to gain approval from NHS Local Research Ethics Committees and of having formal consent processes involving written information sheets and consent forms.  Given that our project aimed at identifying researchers working in at least some health related research areas where such formal processes are the norm we decided to adopt fairly formal consent procedures.  This decision was also made because we felt that conducting research on informed consent demanded that we pay careful attention to our own consent procedures to ensure that we could not be criticised for unethical practice in this regard. 

People invited to participate in our study were contacted via email with an attached letter, information sheet and consent form. They were invited to complete the consent form if, after having read the information, they decided that they wanted to participate.  Our consent form asked research participants to respond and consent to 11 questions, these included agreeing for anonymised quotes to be used in study publications, agreeing for their transcript and audio taped interview being deposited in the ESRC Qualidata archive, enabling them to request a copy of their transcript and having their name acknowledged in the Report and on the study website.

While some researchers made no comment on the formality of the consent process, others, particularly those working in youth and family research, were critical and expressed some concerns about the process. Some researchers working in specific areas of research, had never used or even seen consent forms for research purposes before and the very fact of being presented with one put them off the study.  Some of these researchers declined to sign consent forms, arguing that they were happy for us to do whatever we wanted with the data.  Others did sign but were critical of the process viewing this as part of the increasing bureaucratisation of research and the slippery slope to rule-based ethics in social research which would leave researchers with no room for making ethical judgements in response to the issues arising from a specific research project.  The following comment given by one of our email respondents illustrates this view:

The overly formalistic and paternalistic enforcement of a biomedical model of informed consent is, I believe, sometimes a barrier to qualitative research. … Your statement that 'If you do send us some comments and you would like your contribution to be included in any of our outputs, we will ask you to complete and return an informed consent form on receipt of your email' seems to fall into this category of excessive and unhelpful concern. To repeat, you may use my comments as you like. You do not need a signed consent from me to do so.

Our actions to ensure we had ‘proper’ informed consent arose from a desire to ensure we didn’t exploit our research participants.  Of course this is an important consideration in any research but takes on particular significance when one is conducting research among one’s peer group.  Unlike other research participants, researchers are particularly sensitive to the ways that participating in research might be detrimental to them and we wanted to ensure we had considered and found ways to alleviate these concerns to their satisfaction.  The risks of not doing so could mean alienating our own peer group in what is in effect a relatively small research community.  Of course, it may be the case that adopting formal consent procedures had the effect that we were trying to avoid in some cases.

I want to move now to explore specific issues relating to confidentiality and anonymity that we experienced in this study.

Confidentiality
Confidentiality is commonly understood as akin to privacy (Oliver, 2003).  In general, promises of confidentiality in research are concerned with who will have access to the data and how the data will be used.  Issues of confidentiality relate closely to issues of anonymity. However, I am focusing here on confidentiality of data as distinct from issues of anonymity of study participants which I will focus on separately, although the two issues are closely related.  There are two issues relating to confidentiality that I want to highlight here, these relate to data ownership and what constitutes data.

The issue of data ownership was a central one to our study.  Some researchers view the transcript generated from research as belonging to the researcher who has collected the data and that once the data collection has been completed that the interviewee should have no say over how these data are used.  One of our study participants for example noted:

Participant:     I know some of them [researchers] go as far as saying “I’ll send you the notes from the interview and then you can change anything and, and when I write it up you can have a look at that and you can always veto it”.

Interviewer:     How do you feel about that?

Participant:     I think it’s an abdication of intellectual responsibility by the researcher… the person should know that this [an interview] isn’t a conversation and that it’s on the record and I’m going to make, I’m going to interpret it in my own little way and they don’t have to take part if they don’t want to. (interview 28)

Other researchers, particularly those working in emancipatory or participatory paradigms take a very different approach (e.g., Beresford et al, 1999; Alderson & Morrow, 2003).  One of our study participants, for example, noted:

We did … send back great chunks of the book to contributors [where we] had used extracts from their narratives saying “this is what we’ve done, is this alright, because it names so and so, or it doesn’t name them [but] they will know who they are, do you want us to edit this, do you want to edit it, would you rather we left it out? (interview 15)

Another said:

[I give participants the opportunity] to change it [their transcript].  Now some, some researchers would say not to do that because then you change it but it depends on the context. I’m not going in there to spot people, I mean to catch them you know? I’m trying to understand where they’re at on those particular issues so if they need a little more reflection time than they’ve had in the hour we’ve spent talking then that is fine.  (interview 18)

We made the decision that we would offer our study participants the opportunity to view their own transcript so that, if they weren’t happy with something they had said, they could ask us to amend it before it was used as data.  This was something we had ourselves done only rarely in previous studies although we knew it to be quite a widespread practice.  We decided that this was appropriate in this study party to reassure our study participants about the ways their data would be used but also because of the nature of the data being collected.  The study asked researchers to reflect on their own research practice and also on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or ‘inappropriate’ practice that they knew about which meant that the information they gave might mean that they could be identified and also that they might be critical of other researchers which could have implications for their relationships with their peers and perhaps also for their careers.  Additionally, much of the research reflected on by interviewees concerned research conducted in teams and researchers might reasonably want to discuss this with their colleagues before agreeing to its use.  Our experience in previous research when we have given participants the opportunity to review their transcripts has been that participants tend not to want to amend their interviews.  Many of our participants in this study were pleased to be given the opportunity to review their transcripts and many wanted to amend them, even though they often commented that they would never send transcripts back to their own participants.  The issues that researchers wanted to amend were of three types: data relating to their knowledge of informed consent; data concerning identifying information about studies or colleagues; and, data relating to research ideas which they wanted to publish.  The first of these issues can be seen to reflect researchers’ concerns with giving appropriate responses in an ethical sense to some of the topics we explored with them, and has been touched on above.  I will focus here on the latter two issues which have broader ethical implications.

In the context of the interviews and focus groups that we conducted, researchers frequently identified what they perceived to be ‘bad’ or ‘inappropriate’ practice. In some cases, this concerned well known studies conducted many years ago which are widely reported in discussions of research ethics (such as Millgram’s study and the Tuskegee syphilis study).  However, in other cases, studies discussed were ones that had been conducted by colleagues or other researchers working in the area.  Several researchers were willing to share their views on this and to identify the research project and sometimes the researcher during interviews or focus groups.  This raised a number of ethical issues.  Some researchers noted either at the time of the interview, or in retrospect when they had seen their transcript, that they were not willing for us to use these data, (or in one case, to use it only once they had spoken to the researcher concerned).  In these cases, researchers asked us to remove a whole section from the transcript or to remove a researcher’s name or data that identified a particular project.  This we were obliged to do, given that this was one of the conditions on which participants consented to the study.  However, this sometimes meant that we lost some of the most interesting and important data from individual interviews and also posed some difficulties for us in determining how much needed to be removed from a transcript to ensure we met with participants’ wishes.  In other cases, researchers were unconcerned about our using data relating to specific individuals or studies, often because they had made no secret of their criticism of these research studies in the past. In these cases, it was necessary for us to make decisions about whether we felt it was appropriate to include these identifying data in our study and again this sometimes left us with difficult decisions to make.

A further issue relating to confidentiality and data ownership relates to researchers’ concerns that we should not ‘steal’ their own ideas around research practice which they planned to publish subsequently.  One of the aims of our study was to identify and disseminate good practice to the social science community in relation to informed consent with specific groups.  We were aware that there was a wealth of good practice being developed, particularly in relation to research with children and people with various communication difficulties and viewed it as important that this was disseminated broadly in the interests of improving practice.  However, while some researchers, notably those working outside of academia, were very keen that their ideas should be widely disseminated, several academic researchers were equally keen that we should not report their ideas in any of our research publications.   Interestingly, we found that some researchers were keen to publish ideas they viewed as novel that we knew from our research were widely known and had been published in other topic areas or disciplines.

A second set of issues around confidentiality concerned what should count as data. Conducting research within one’s own community means that researchers often have knowledge about individuals outside of the data collection context.  Many of the researchers involved in our study were known to at least one of the members of our research team as past or present colleagues.  This meant that we had knowledge about the research they had conducted and their approach to ethical issues that was generated outside of the interview or focus group context.  Knowledge about the research and approach of our research participants was also gained through personal contact, hearing their presentations at conferences and reading their work – this was particularly they case for those who had written widely on research ethics and consent in social research.  It is inevitably difficult to separate out that knowledge when viewing the data we generated or, perhaps more commonly/importantly when talking informally about the research and our findings.  This has ethical implications.  Our research participants had consented to take part in the study and for the use of the data that were generated from the interviews and focus groups.  As researchers we had to be mindful of and to distinguish between: 1) what was public knowledge in terms of our participants’ expressed views in their presentations and their research; 2) what was data generated in our study for public consumption but which must be anonymised; and 3) what was private knowledge that we had gained from our research or from our personal knowledge of an individual that we did not have individual’s consent to use.

Anonymity
It is common practice in social research for researchers to conceal the identity of research participants through pseudonyms and, in some cases, to change other biographical details in order that individuals cannot be recognised (Corden & Sainsbury, 2004).  There is considerable debate about the extent to which it is appropriate to amend data in the interests of anonymity.  It has been noted that the greater the level of anonymisation and the further it moves from its original context, the less useful are the data (Thomson & Bzdel, 2004).  However, it is not always the case that research participants want their identity concealed and there appears to be a move towards greater identification of participants in some areas of research.  A number of our study participants identified research studies they had been involved with where individuals preferred to be identified.  This was particularly the case in relation to research with children and in the palliative care context (see, for example, Grinyer, 2002). 

We had anticipated anonymising our study participants in our research report and publications, in that we didn’t intend to identify particular data with specific individuals.  However, we did want to be able to indicate the breadth of expertise we had drawn on in the study and hoped to be able to identify a list of people who had contributed to the study in the Project Report and on our website.  We also viewed this as a way of acknowledging participants’ contribution and thought that participants might consider there to be some kudos from being associated with the study.  With 31 interviews plus 6 focus groups the numbers of study participants were, we felt, sufficiently high to make individual identifications from this list of who had said what difficult, if not impossible.  However, this approach of course does threaten anonymity which, in any case, was particularly problematic in this study.  Many of the study participants were well known and easily identifiable; the research community in specific areas is relatively small and it is an easy task for fellow academics to identify individuals. Furthermore, the focus of the study meant that researchers drew on their own research studies as illustrations of their approach to informed consent and this would enable participants to be easily identified.  The management of these issues has been particularly problematic in this study and I want to highlight some of the issues.

We found that, after some initial reticence, most researchers were very open in sharing their views, experiences and attitudes to informed consent.  This involved them talking about their own research projects in some detail as well as discussing other research studies they knew about.  We had assured researchers that we would use only anonymised quotes in study publications and all the study participants consented to this.  There was no discussion with study participants of how this would occur and what level of anonymisation we would use.  Our intention was that the level of anonymisation would comprise the use of pseudonyms throughout, in terms of study participants and other individuals that they identified, and also the removal of any reference to a specific study by name.  However, we were aware that this would not necessarily mean that study participants were actually anonymous to others in the research community who would be likely to read study publications.  This did not appear to be a concern to our study participants but was not something that was discussed explicitly with them.  Nevertheless, it is an issue that we have felt it necessary to take very seriously.  We have not yet written the study report or papers for publication although we have presented various papers at conferences. In these we have been at pains to avoid presenting data which might identify particular individuals.  Again this has meant we have had, at times, to leave out some of our best data.  In a presentation such as this one focusing on what researchers didn’t want made public it has meant that our presentation is restricted to a descriptive account rather than enabling us to use quotes from our participants.  One way of dealing with this would be to get our study participants’ agreement for the way that data are used in papers prior to submission for publication.  However, the logistics of doing this are rather prohibitive.

In contrast to researchers’ approach to anonymity in the use of their data in written outputs from the study, several of our study participants (n=17; seven interview participants and 10 focus group participants) were reluctant to have their name identified in the Project Report and on the study website.  Furthermore, a number (n=7) did not consent to their data being archived in the ESRC Qualidata Archive.  The reasons for not wanting their names identified in the Project Report appeared to be a concern that their name would be associated with a view that they did not personally agree with.  Clearly, research participants do not know what the outcome of the study will be or what recommendations will be made and it is understandable that researchers might therefore be reluctant to be named in the study.  However, it is likely that fellow academics reading publications from the study or the report could nevertheless take an educated guess about the identity of our study participants.  The refusal by a large number of study participants to be named in the study has meant that, given that we can’t name all participants, it is likely that we will not name any.

There are a number of reasons why participants might not want their data stored in the Qualidata Archive.  Qualidata’s preference for archiving is that there is thorough documentation and original, anonymised data, as long as there is clear consent from participants for this.  The users of the archived material are likely to be primarily other academics and so, not surprisingly, our study participants are likely to have had concerns about anonymity and the use to which their data would be put.  They may also have had concerns about their data being retained in the archive in perpetuity; academics frequently change their views on topics through the course of a career and they may have had concerns about having their views at a particular point in time retained for others to access. Linked to this may have been concerns about the nature of the interview; views expressed in an interview are not necessarily as clearly expressed as those set out in a research paper.  While it is possible for there to be restrictions on the use of data held in the archive, our study participants may not have been aware of this and indeed, it was not something we discussed with them.  Our concern was to recruit people to the study and we had no particular wish to see these data archived, although Qualidata has expressed a particular interest in receiving it.  It would still be possible to archive the data minus the seven participants who refused permission although we would want to go back and check with our participants to ensure they understood the implications of this.

Issues: implications for research more broadly
I want to conclude by drawing out some of the implications of the issues identified here for research more broadly. 

First we want to note that, in terms of consent, our participants in this study were able to give informed consent in ways that other study participants arguably are not, however good may be the process of explaining a study to participants.  Many of our study participants reported that, in their own research, they found that participants frequently disregarded researchers’ explanations of what study participation would entail because they were keen to ‘get on with it’, this seems to be particularly the case with research with relatively powerless groups.  As researchers, our study participants understand what participating in a study will entail because they know the ‘tricks of the trade’; they know the data may be interpreted in ways that they did not intend and they understand what ‘confidentiality’ and ‘anonymity’ mean in practice.  This meant, for many of them, that they were cautious in how they presented themselves, were keen to check their transcripts and, in some cases, wanted to take a number of steps to ensure anonymity.  However, at the same time, we are aware that many of our participants, like research participants in any study, often felt encouraged to reveal more in interviews than they may have originally intended (which is why they were keen to alter their transcripts) and some appeared unaware of the full implications of their involvement, taking it on trust that we would anonymise them appropriately.  If this is the case among a sample of expert researchers, then how much more vulnerable are those without this knowledge? 

In common with many other social researchers we are mindful of the dangers of increased regulation and further formalising of consent procedures. However, our research indicates the importance of identifying ways in which potential research participants can gain a clear understanding of what participating in research actually entails.  The challenge to researchers is to do this without adversely affecting people’s willingness to participate in research.

The second point relates to consent and the interpretation of data.  Consent procedures often pay scant attention to the end product of research (publications, reports and presentations) and many research participants are not aware of how their data are actually used.   This raises the issue of consent as a process and whether participants’ express consent should be given for the use of their data in study publications and presentations.  This has significant implications on the freedom of the researcher to interpret the data in the way she or he views as appropriate and poses an ethical dilemma in balancing the rights or needs of the participant with the needs of the research and the researcher.  Many researchers would argue that it is not necessarily desirable to gain consent from study participants for how their data are used in that this would curtail researchers’ freedom to interpret their data and curtail the critical nature of the discipline.  There are numerous illustrations in sociology of cases in which researchers have identified findings with which the research funder or participating organisation are unhappy (see Punch, 1985; Herdman, 2000; Lawton, 2001).  The subsequent report or publication has sometimes had significant implications resulting in poor future relations between the researcher, or even research more generally, and the organisation or funder.  Nevertheless, sociologists would defend their right to interpret their data in the way they see fit and this poses some difficulties in terms of participants’ consent. 

The third related point concerns the move towards greater user involvement and participatory models of research. Some areas of research, such as research with children and young people and research in mental health, have well-developed models of participatory practice, particularly in relation to research around service evaluation (see, for example, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1999).  Developments in other areas have meant that consumers are becoming increasingly involved in research design and data collection as well as in research outputs.  Indeed, it is a pre-requisite for much Government and NHS funded research that research users or consumers are involved in the research process.  The impact this will have on researchers’ freedom to conduct research in the ways that they view as appropriate is as yet unclear but it may be that this, in conjunction with increased regulation from ethics committees, will act as a factor limiting the critical nature of sociological research. 

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