Ethics and the Ethical Enquiry (EE) Form has been a bigger beast to tackle than I could have imagined.
I started by looking at the example EE form and trying to map my project and ideas against it. Everything is red means it wasn’t final (basically the whole document!) I had lots of ideas, and everything was feeling a little bit muddy. Using the Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research (2018) I tried to understand what I needed to consider in each section.
I received verbal feedback on my first EE form, and immediately started the next draft. I started to slim down some of my ambitions given the limited time I have – ‘make it manageable’ keeps whirring round my head. Generating questions that I might use within my research method. Basically just trying to get some concrete ideas down and get rid of the mass of red text.
The written feedback on my second draft was invaluable, and made me realise I wasn’t really digging deep enough and that I need to make it align with my research method more closely. The example EE form I now realise was vague – it needs to be in order to be applicable to to everyone, but what I didn’t do was consider any of the ethical challenges that could have arisen specifically linked to focus groups. While the Ethical Guidlines (2018) were useful, they are brief and not focused on one methodology. Reading Focus group methodology: Some ethical challenges by Sim & Waterfield (2019), made realise that consent and disclosure work very differently with focus groups because of the nature of having multiple participants at once, and the data being co-constructed rather than individual. This helped me to understand how I could document the data, audio and activities rather than note taking. It also made me realise that there were risks to myself as the researcher within the process.
Almost there! The research into ethics surround focus groups really helped to bolster my EE form and made me feel like I knew exactly what I was stepping into – versions 1 & 2 were under researched for sure! The only comment was based around my questions for the focus group and if the tool had been tested and how. They hadn’t so I tested them in a variety of ways which you can read about here, and included this in the form. And it was approved – HURRAH!
Although my 4th iteration of the EE form was approved and signed, I later found out that there was a small budget I was able to use for snacks and beverages for my focus groups, so I included this in a revised version to included a section on incentives. I also chose to reword some of my focus group questions so wanted to update these is a final version.
References
- British Educational Research Association (2018). Ethical guidelines for educational research. 4th ed. [online] London: British Educational Research Association. Available at: https://www.bera.ac.uk/publication/ethical-guidelines-for-educational-research-2018-online.
- Sim, J. and Waterfield, J. (2019). Focus group methodology: Some ethical challenges. Quality & Quantity, [online] 53(6), pp.3003–3022. Available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11135-019-00914-5.