Community based qualitative health research: negotiating ethics in India

Abstract

In the last two decades, rise of community-based qualitative health research (CBQHR) has given impetus to deliberations on ethics, primarily on inequality between the researcher and the researched, and the principles of flexible and non-deductive field design adopted in CBQHR. The paper attempts to understand ethics as a process of negotiation at various stages in the field after the Research Ethical Board’s (REB’s) approval. The paper identifies three vulnerable stages of ethical negotiations: consent at commencement stage; data-collection stage (interview, observations, and ethnography); and data analysis at the collation stage in the context of a developing economy. Analysis suggests that REBs need to graduate from a product certification to ethical governance process to address the inherent flexibility and inequality that exists between the researcher and researched in developing countries like India.