Rethinking Ethical Questions in Life-History Interview Research

Abstract

Having interviewed Germans who emigrated to Israel and, in most cases, converted to Judaism, I experienced a paralyzing sense of ethical conflict when I began analyzing the first order discourse my participants and I had co-constructed to transform it into the second-order discourse of research publications. So, I set out to rethink the ethics of life-history interview research. My quest into our ethical responsibilities began with rule-based deontological and consequentialist ethics and the guidelines in the social sciences they inform. It led me to reconsider such core notions as informed consent, privacy, and risk-benefit analysis. I came to realize that rule-based ethics are inherently inadequate for addressing the situation-specific and thus unpredictable ethical questions that arise in conducting and analyzing life-history interviews. Next, I turned to the notion of ethical conflict as arising from obligations to trust and truth and rethought it as responsibilities toward participants and audiences. I realized that our responsibilities extend beyond our interview partners, who entrusted us with their life stories, to the audiences, who engage with our analyses. I furthermore reevaluated using research to advocate for disenfranchised participants and argued for transparency and reflexivity regarding how our subject positions impact knowledge construction.