Consenting to the Consent Form

Abstract

Grounded in the author's dissertation study, this article presents the negotiations of the formal and informal expectations arising out of interpretations of the consent form. These negotiations disrupt the structure of qualitative inquiry and its associated guidelines for academic rigor, trustworthiness, and transferability. If the understanding of the consent form and its meaning is contingent and permanently deferred, then how does the relationship between the researcher and the researched inform de/colonizing methodologies? Using a vignette, the author explores how member checks and re-presentation are affected by the intersection of colonizing and decolonizing epistemologies within the current context of troubled “scientific” inquiry. She also discusses how a fluid process of consenting, insider-outsider kinship relations between the researcher and the researched, and the inadequacy of Western structures of inquiry open up alternate spaces of discussion for scientific inquiry that is responsive to the space of blurred relationships, messy methodology, and collaborative designs often present in qualitative research.