Thanks Genevieve for drawing our attention to this very real part of life
and research: a very difficult situation that to some degree a
researcher, (and especially an ethnogrpaher) would encounter somewhere
sometime in her/his course of conducting research among real life people
in real life situations (as compared to e.g., well-controlled and
manipualted laboratory situations)..
It's been "lucky" on my part that I have so far not found myself in such
a difficult situation comparable to the one you mentioned. But when I
was videotaping classroom lessons in schools in Hong Kong, I was very
aware of the fact that teachers and students could have acted very
differently given my presence and the fact that everything they said and
did would be captured and recorded under camera!
My supervisor (James Heap) gave me a lot of helpful encouragement
when I was troubled with this sort of questions... I came to realize
that there's no escaping from this "entangledness" of myself, my
research, my research data, my informants... we're all mutually
constituting and reconstituting one another's life and activities...
but the thing is to to BE
there and to see what happens, to change the scene and see what happens
(somewhat like the "formative experiments" of Griffin et al. and Mike's
work at the LCHC)...
My private interviews with small groups of working class schoolboys in
the schools where I did my videotaping and ethnographic work also led me
into great personal dilemmas and agony... a few things like:
(a) they told me terrible things happening in their school, community and
home; and yet I'm no social worker, no police, no... and that they told
me these things (e.g., ccrime gangs recruiting members from their
classmates) because they dare not tell any other adults and would tell me
because I'd from the outset pledged to be confidential about their
identity...)
(b) other researchers would cast doubts on their accounts... were they
pulling my leg to win sympathy from this young female researcher from the
university?
There can be ways to ascertain the credibility of research interview
accounts (I presented a paper on this, "Pulling your leg or on our terms!
The playful and artful accounting practices of Cantonese working class
schoolboys" in a qualitative research conference...), but the ethnical
question remains: how to help your informants while protecting their
confidentiality?
We do not live in an ideal world... social injustice, violence, poverty,
crimes, child abuse, girl abuse, boy abuse... everything happens around
us... when we honestly do our ethnographic research, we're bound to bump
into these things... we may be a constitutive part of them! Our graduate
school "ethics committee" guidelines and procedures do not equip us with
anything to deal with these practical situations (sometimes these
procedures may actually get in the way of helping to improve things, but
we cannot do without them either, for they do serve some protection
purposes...) So, where are we now?????
Angel