Abstract
How to investigate psychologically relevant phenomena in the most ethical ways possible is an enduring question for researchers not only in psychology but also in adjacent fields that study human subjectivity. Once acknowledging that both researchers and the people whose lives they want to study are human beings acting in a common world, also inhabited by non-human beings, the relationship between researchers and participants touches upon fundamental questions not only about what it means to do research together, but also what it means to conduct life in this world together. This implies that questions regarding what counts as ethical conduct need to be accentuated and also profoundly re-drawn given the encompassing complexity of these relations. In this article, we will shortly review the theoretical foundations and associated problematics of the dominant view of the researcher-researched relationship in current psychological (and other) research ethics. We then present and discuss what we mean by a relational ethical position from within practice and for practice. We will also shortly introduce how the other contributions to this special section advance the theoretical debates on research ethics.
Highlights
How to investigate psychologically relevant phenomena in the most ethical ways possible is an enduring question for researchers in psychology and in adjacent fields that study human subjectivity
We present and discuss what we mean by a relational ethical position from within practice and for practice
While the initial contributions to this special section all share the commitment of theorizing research ethics and ethical decision-making as dependent on the concrete everyday circumstances of the researcher and the researched, and on how these play into the situated context of their relational encounter and connectedness, it becomes evident how the conceptual minutiae of relational ethics deeply depend on the ontological, epistemological and methodological premises engrained in the respective theoretical tradition and perspective
Summary
“For we owe the very possibility of our having a life of our own to their [the others] responsiveness toward us” (Shotter 2005, p. 129). While these sets of principles, like the Nuremberg Code of Ethics or the Helsinki Declaration, marked a leap forward in ensuring research participants’ human rights, they have met with strong criticism from both the humanistic and the social sciences (e.g., Dingwall 2012; Emmerich 2016) This can both be related to the increasing proliferation and acceptance of qualitative research across fields of research (e.g., Roth 2005; see Miller et al 2012; Unger et al 2016), and to new digital possibilities to scrutinize (massive) amounts of (partly sensitive) data without the knowledge of the researched person(s) in question (e.g., Markham et al 2018). To illustrate what we mean by this, we will in the remaining pages suggest some central conceptual features of a relational ethics that is to foundationally reconfigure the researcher-researched relationship as inextricably intertwined in one another’s everyday lived life
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