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International Journal of Social Research Methodology

ISSN: 1364-5579 (Print) 1464-5300 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tsrm20

Teaching research ethics as active learning: reading Venkatesh and Goffman as curriculum resources

Martin Tolich, Louisa Choe, Adam Doesburg, Amy Foster, Rachel Shaw & David Wither

To cite this article: Martin Tolich, Louisa Choe, Adam Doesburg, Amy Foster, Rachel Shaw & David Wither (2017) Teaching research ethics as active learning: reading Venkatesh and Goffman as curriculum resources, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 20:3, 243-253, DOI: 10.1080/13645579.2017.1287870

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2017.1287870

Published online: 19 Feb 2017.

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InternatIonal Journal of SocIal reSearch Methodology, 2017 Vol. 20, no. 3, 243–253 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2017.1287870

Teaching research ethics as active learning: reading Venkatesh and Goffman as curriculum resources

Martin Tolicha, Louisa Choeb, Adam Doesburgb, Amy Fosterb, Rachel Shawc and David Witherb

aSociology, gender and Social Work, the university of otago, otago, new Zealand; bSociology, university of otago, dunedin, new Zealand; cgender Studies, university of otago, dunedin, new Zealand

ABSTRACT The pedagogy of teaching research methods, let alone research ethics, is an under-researched field. In this article a sociology lecturer connects five postgraduate students in a qualitative research ethics course with two novice ethnographers’ candid empirical studies. While it is common for students to read articles and books on the topic, what was unusual in this ethics course was assigning the readings without priming the students of the ethical concepts of autonomy, do no harm, respect for persons or beneficence. The article documents how these students drew on their prior tacit knowledge of ethics to critique these two empirical studies both in classroom discussions and later in their written assignments. Each student wrote an account of the two texts before joining forces to construct a joint auto ethnographic account based on their reflective journals and on transcriptions of their classroom discussions. Invariably the students’ tacit knowledge allowed them to successfully locate core ethical issues within these two texts.

This article reports on a pedagogical innovation in teaching research ethics for postgraduate students focusing on encouraging active learning. Previously the lecturer had taught postgraduate students in his qualitative research ethics course about research ethics by beginning teaching ethics in a principled manner focusing on the principles of do no harm, beneficence, autonomy and core concepts such as confidentiality. Once identified he had the students explore these terms in key texts (Duncombe & Jessop, 2002; Iphofen, 2011; Israel and Hay, 2006; Miller, 2012; Stark, 2012). In 2016 the lecturer used a different strategy, what he now recognises others label experiential or learning by doing (Lewthwaite & Nind, 2016). A feature of this strategy is recognising and drawing on students’ prior learning. While this course was the students’ first introduction to research ethics, they arrived at the class with an intuitive ability to make sound judgements about research ethics.

These strategies of encouraging active engagement and getting students to read actual studies are not novel; what is novel pedagogically is having the students read the texts with no prior instruction. This experiential pedagogic model encouraged students to teach themselves research ethics within the safe boundaries of the classroom. This partially replicates Kilburn, Nind, and Wiles (2014) in connecting learners to a world of methods through active engagement by substituting access research methods texts to research ethics texts.

© 2017 Informa uK limited, trading as taylor & francis group

KEYWORDS Qualitative research ethics; pedagogy; Venkatesh; goffman

ARTICLE HISTORY received 13 June 2016 accepted 16 January 2017

CONTACT Martin tolich [email protected]

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To facilitate this learning the lecturer deliberately assigned two texts; Sudhir Venkatesh’s (2008) Gangleader for a Day and Alice Goffman’s (2014) On the Run. There were five reasons for this choice. First, they were authored by sociologists; second, they used ethnographic methods; third, they were both recent best sellers, which is rare for a sociology text; and fourth, all of the texts were in the public domain so there was no reason to seek ethical approval to review them.

The fifth reason for assigning these two texts was fundamental to a course on research ethics in an age of mandatory ethics review for academic research (Israel and Hay 2006). Neither of the two authors provides any evidence in their books that they had sought ethics review prior to beginning their research. The lecturer believed the students would encounter ethical problems in the text that developed from not respecting the autonomy of subjects and gaining their voluntary participation and informed consent, processes highlighted in formal ethics review and in this class as a categorical imperative. Yet at the same time the lecturer wanted to expose the students to the limitations of formal ethics review. Many of the ethical problems the students were likely to find in these books were examples of ethics in practice (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004), big ethical moments that develop in the field, not likely predicted by researcher or an ethics committee in formal ethics review. This matrix of problem solving was a core goal of the course, providing stu- dents with insight into how ethical issues arose in the field as well demonstrating the advantages and limitations of formal ethics review.

The students read Venkatesh’s Gangleader for a Day first, before taking that learning into the Goffman text. Rather than highlighting in advance what ethical principles or concepts the students needed to identify, the lecturer instructed the students to take the perspective of any person men- tioned in these books and asked students how they would feel about being studied and reported on in the text. In other words, from their assigned role as participants the students were encouraged to locate and resolve moral dilemmas and teach themselves research ethics. In the main the students did that well.

Assigning texts with challenging examples of ethics is not a new pedagogy. Milgram (1974), Zimbardo, Haney, Banks, and Jaffe (1973), and Humphreys (1975) are documented in the literature as examples of great horror stories (Wiles 2013). What is new here is treating the texts as primary data allowing students to reflect on what they intuitively see as the strengths and weakness of the authors’ treatment of research participants.

The lecturer had one other pedagogical goal and that was to involve the students in an evaluation of the course. From the outset the lecturer saw an opportunity for the students to write an article about the course. In the first class he invited them to contribute to writing the document and ideally taking sole charge of writing a collective auto ethnographic exercise. The lecturer wanted the students to grasp the complexities, which there were many, of writing a journal article. The students were enthusiastic to be writing their first academic journal article and while the lecturer mentored the production of the first draft the students were sole authors. The lecturer then submitted the students’ collective enterprise to this journal on their behalf. He later contributed to subsequent drafts, especially the framing of the pedagogic goals of the course.

While the response from the journal editors and reviewers was encouraging, they deemed the initial article needing a major revision to capture the context of the pedagogy and how the class compares with other courses on research ethics. Much of this context reported above captures the students’ experience within the lecturer’s pedagogic goals.

The methodology used to compile this article was multi-faceted. With the students’ permission, the weekly classroom discussions were both tape-recorded and transcribed. The actual consent process (described below) was part of the learning by doing. Each student also wrote an individual essay based on their interpretation of the assigned books. The students then met outside class time to collate their story. In the body of the article the five students describe in a chronological fashion the process of their reading and exploring these texts, highlighting ethical issues from the participants’ perspective. The initial paper began drawing on a set of four reflective, if not leading questions, the students com- mented on during the course.

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(1) Briefly describe your knowledge of research ethics at the start of the exercise. (2) In what ways, if any, was this learning a transformative experience? (3) What was the most interesting moment in class? (4) Was this course a good way to learn about ethics?

The students found both assigned books would have benefited from formal ethics review. However, had either author sought ethics review it is doubtful these studies would have gained ethics approval as neither researcher recognised the autonomy of their subjects by seeking informed consent. Moreover, what made these ethnographies interesting for teaching purposes was the absence of formal ethics review.

The lecturer’s own reflection of the new pedagogy was that it was successful, although he set up no formal comparisons to establish this success. He wanted to test learning by doing models where students read texts, located problems, identified principles and rectified the situation as they would in their own research. Unrelated to learning about research ethics the lecturer wanted to expose students to the vagaries of writing a journal article. While they were successful in getting an article accepted subject to a major revision, the article would not have been publishable without the lecturer placing the exercise in a wider pedagogic context. He thanks the journal editor for this opportunity.

At various stages the students saw the research in black and white terms questioning the ethics of both authors. This judgemental stance was an error; more respect should be given to the two authors who had bared their ethical soul to the reader. This second iteration of the article has a different tone than the previous iteration. The revised article focuses less on a critique of the two authors and more on the opportunity these two authors provide any lecturer and their students wanting to create a real time, safe, experiential learning experience. In this new space students were not expected to rote learn ethical definitions, rather once they located an issue, they were required to define it and apply the appropriate ethical principle. The opportunity to play armchair critic was cherished. To that end, students and lecturer are grateful these two authors wrote in a style that opened themselves and their research to scrutiny, allowing novice researchers the opportunity of following their pathways. This open style permitted the students to ponder both problems and alternative research strategies.

Prior to introducing these two texts in the second and third class respectively the lecturer sought to plumb the prior learning of the course participants. On the first day he introduced an ethical dilemma embodied within the logistics of writing the journal article and a newspaper article that established that research ethics were essentially about recognising power inequalities between the researcher and the participants (Lynley, 2016). The five students now tell their collective narrative in chronological order beginning with what they knew about research ethics prior to the course.

Graduate school: day one

The five of us sat silently as strangers with our lecturer around an oval table in the first class of our postgraduate careers in Sociology. Unbeknownst to us we were already busy collecting the mental field notes we would later use to collectively write up this article. Few of us knew anything about the subject matter, qualitative research ethics, yet the lecturer respected our prior knowledge.

Prior to class, the only understanding of [research] ethics I had was a standard textbook definition: conducting research ethically means to do research in a safe and secure manner where participants’ wellbeing and interests are safeguarded during the pursuit of knowledge.

My prior knowledge of qualitative ethics was limited to writing a paragraph for ‘ethical consideration’ for under- grad courses.

I began this class with what I felt was a reasonably comprehensive knowledge of the basic ethical concepts that might be encountered within quantitative social science research. What I quickly learnt is just how different qualitative and quantitative research ethics are.

As I did not understand the amount of theory that goes behind qualitative ethics I found myself expecting this course to be about applying for ethics approval.

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I knew pretty much nothing. I knew a little about ethics committees, but nothing about the actual lived ethics experience.

After a little housekeeping, brief introductions and handing out course outlines, our lecturer took a digital recorder from his pocket and placed it on the tabletop. He then did something awkward; he switched it on and a tiny red light blinked. With it, the room fell into an uneasy silence. One student reflection on the course recalled the tenseness of the situation.

The walls seemed at once to close in, and disappear altogether. I felt watched, judged even, and painfully aware of the small device now listening to my every sound. With tightness rising in my throat, nerves and thoughts collided. My immediate reactions ranged from inquisitive to cautious, playful to suspicious, when out of all the consternation emerged a singularly clear voice. ‘Is this ethical?’ asked one of my fellow students. ‘That’s a great question,’ responded the lecturer. ‘What do you mean is that ethical?’ Again silence reigned, the lecturer abdi- cated the floor. As if to help the lecturer out another student translated the question. ‘He means do you need our consent to have that tape recorder on?’ ‘That is a good question,’ the lecturer said. ‘Do I?’ Without waiting for a response he eased tensions by saying he would need consent if he planned to listen to the audio recording, but he had no plans to do that. The audio recording was solely for the benefit of us, the students. But the surprises continued. Our lecturer then invited the five of us to use these recordings to write this journal article. To provide some space for our consultation he then left the room for a few minutes while we considered his proposal. When he returned we collectively, and enthusiastically, said yes to his proposal.

What follows describes the next four weeks of the course where we wrote formal essays on the assigned readings and books. While we all received good grades in these exercises the lecturer noted our essays failed to sufficiently capture a narrative voice. Much of this article then results from his encouragement to find our collective narrative voice that had been eradicated in our undergraduate careers. After attempting to write the essay separately, then bringing our various pieces together, we formed a writing group, which served to act much like a focus group. From there we discussed and elaborated on each other’s responses. Recognising and testing scenarios as ethical became a central theme in these discussions. In each of the books assigned for review we saw similarities in the basic errors stemming from researchers who were focused more on their data collection than on establishing basic ethical considerations. Neither book was based on covert research and, as a rule, ethnographers researching private spaces rather than public spaces should ask people they are researching if they are willing to be included in the study.

The learning from these first moments was for us to become aware of and listen to our gut feelings, particularly in regard to any unease with what we read. With the lecturer’s encouragement, we iden- tified and challenged ethical issues as they arose in our reading and in discussions. We had passed the lecturer’s first red light test on the audio recording by asking, ‘is this [recording device] ethical?’

With the lecturer’s brief to think ethically firmly established, we modified it with our own question: Is this ethical? Thus we launched head first into our road trip to learn qualitative research ethics and then write about it critically. Was this really a good way to learn qualitative research ethics? For the next three weeks the audio recorder remained on. With the flick of a switch the lecturer had pried ethics from the printed page and set it loose amongst the five of us.

The power of ethics

The assigned reading for the first class was neither of these books but a recent newspaper article (Lynley, 2016) that we were asked to summarise and highlight any ethical issues. In brief, a foreign researcher had interviewed staff at a New Zealand university to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of that university’s administration. But for a few exceptions the researcher did not disclose to study participants that he had applied for the Vice Chancellor’s position (CEO) of the university or that the selection committee had made him the only candidate. We considered this project as research and in New Zealand ethics review is mandatory for any research involving academic staff members.

Concerned that the researcher did not declare their prospective identity, we classified this act as representing a conflict of interest. Although participants consented to participate in the researcher’s study they remained uninformed as to the true purpose of the research or the identity of the researcher.

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Although critical of the future vice-chancellor’s resort to deception, we were more deeply disturbed by an abuse of power by the soon-to-be head of institution. The future Vice Chancellor availed him- self to the thoughts of those whom he would soon have formal institutional authority over without establishing his conflict of interest. The audio transcript recorded concerns:

He should have told them that he was the preferred choice for VC and that he wanted opinions on how the university was running.

Maybe people would have felt more obliged to cooperate, if they knew this guy was going to be their new boss; would there have been many that declined the request?

Learning in this Qualitative Research Ethics class was incremental. By putting the audio recorder in front of the class our lecturer had tried to capitalise on a power differential implicit within our own group between lecturer and students. Would we complain about the audio recording and express our autonomy so fundamental to ethical research? We did. But after careful consideration we allowed its presence knowing the promised access to the raw data in the future would benefit us. We had successfully negotiated the terms of our own verbal informed consent. Had any member of the class objected to the tape recorder, not wanting another student to hear what they said in class, the audio recorder would have been removed. In the scenario above, the future Vice Chancellor extended his participants no such opportunity. Their ideas were captured under false pretence for a purpose they were not aware of.

And so power emerged as a main ethical issue. As sociologists, power was frequently discussed in our undergraduate courses. In any case where a superior (a lecturer) seeks the informed consent of a subordinate (a student) there is room for exploitation of the power differentials. This is coercive, undermining the autonomy of the individual. Our conclusions mirrored that of an article co-written that week by our lecturer about the ethics of the Vice Chancellor (Israel, Smith, & Tolich, 2016). Clearly we were on the right track.

As the recording red light remained lit for the next three classes, the class read two best-sellers, Goffman’s On the Run (2014), Venkatesh’s Gangleader for Day (2008) and, serendipitously, Carolyn Ellis’ Fisherfolk (1986) that came into the frame when the lecturer introduced one of his articles on internal confidentiality (Tolich 2004) to the course to flesh out our understanding of a nuance of the Venkatesh book. During this short but rewarding exercise we learned to distinguish external confi- dentiality – that is, an assurance the information the researcher gains will not identify the participant or the research site – from internal confidentiality (the concern that participants not named in the text may be identifiable by other participants). In our reading, lapses in internal confidentiality meant that although Venkatesh and Ellis may not have named the research site, all those who were written about could recognise each other.

As the class identified core ethical concepts in the reading of these two texts, the lecturer introduced a clutch of related books (Israel & Hay, 2006; Israel, 2015), readings on Whyte’s (1943/1981) Street Corner Society, Milgram and Zimbardo’s experiments (Tolich, 2014) and codes of ethics that high- lighted informed consent, do no harm and confidentiality, like the Belmont and Nuremberg codes. In each text our task was to match ethical concepts we had previously found morally problematic in the two books.

Another key reading by Guillemin and Gillam (2004) on reflexivity made a powerful case for the demarcation between procedural ethics or formal ethics review and ethics in practice; the big ethical moments that unfold in qualitative research, which neither the researcher nor the ethics review com- mittee could have predicted in the initial formal review.

By applying Guillemin and Gillam’s demarcation, the class became conscious of two often- contradictory dimensions of ethics in qualitative research. While the class agreed on the important role played by ethics review in guiding researchers to avoid some ethical problems in their research, the class’s dissection of the accounts of Venkatesh, Goffman and Ellis made it apparent that many of the ethical problems these authors experienced would not have been picked up in formal procedural ethics had they gone through that process. Our focus was therefore centred on Guillemin and Gillam’s

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(2004) notion of ‘big ethical moments’ that occur during ethics in practice. This demarcation was noted as a highpoint in one reflective note:

A breakthrough moment for me was reading about the differences between procedural ethics and ethics in prac- tice. Once I had that distinction, I could see much more clearly how Venkatesh, Goffman, and Ellis were allowed to make so many mistakes. From these authors’ mistakes, I was able to learn how procedural ethics can change in the field, but there is always recourse to deal with these changes reflexively. The very fact that the authors didn’t follow these recourses made it easier for me to distinguish where they went wrong. Many of the problems identified would have been apparent to an ethics review committee, but they should have been apparent to the researcher too. They were clear even to us and we had little ethics training.

Gangleader for a day

Venkatesh (2008) self-reports as a rogue sociologist, who in Gangleader for a Day details his seven years in a Chicago housing project in which he studied informal economies (see also Venkatesh & Venkatesh, 2009). We read the entire Gangleader for a Day book but our discussion tended to focus on one chapter, chapter six, entitled ‘The Hustled and the Hustler’. Our task was not just to find ethical dilemmas but also to look at them within a hierarchy of ethical issues. Which was the most important?

As we reported our concerns back to the class during week two, the discussion focused around one incident; Venkatesh (2008) attempted to triangulate the data he had extracted from the high rise residents with J.T., the gangleader and Ms. Bailey, the project manager. Venkatesh’s data revealed the many ways the tenants earned money without reporting the earning to either the IRS or these two gatekeepers.

For the next three hours, I went through my notebooks and told them [JT and Mrs Bailey] what I’d learned about dozens of hustlers, male and female. There was Bird, the guy who sold license plates, Social Security cards, and small appliances out of his van…I finally left, riding the bus home to my apartment. I was grateful for having had the opportunity to discuss my findings with two of the neighborhood’s most formidable power brokers (Venkatesh, 2008, pp. 200, 201).

The fallout from this breach of confidentiality threatened the livelihoods of residents, none of whom had given Venkatesh their informed consent. Immediately the two gatekeepers, JT and Mrs Bailey are reported to have visited the tenants to tax their earnings. This breach of confidentiality placed him in danger as one resident suggested to Venkatesh (2008, p. 206) that he not use the stairs, as his body would never be found.

Faithfully the audio tape recorder captured our round table discussions as we rapidly unearthed a handful of ethical issues. These arose around the reckless unsecured storage of data in another person’s apartment and how the interviews were secured through coercion, as both gatekeepers undermined the tenants’ autonomy when strong-arming Venkatesh’s access to them.

Following the class discussion and using our twenty-twenty hindsight vision we suggested a number of interventions Ventkatesh could have adopted. At the same time we were cognizant that each of these suggestions undermined the viability of Venkatesh’s project as an academic project subject to normal ethical oversight. We agreed that Venkatesh should have gained informed consent form the participants prior to interviewing them. He should have stored his data more securely and not shared the data with other research participants, especially the two gatekeepers. He should have avoided situations that put him and others in harm, such as adjudicating disputes that led to an assault (Venkatesh, 2008, p. 129). In considering how the study might have been conducted ethically, we came to the conclusion that Venkatesh provided little evidence that he was aware of basic ethical considerations.

Despite still being new to the subject of qualitative ethics, we each turned up to class with numerous ethical concerns about the way Venkatesh described his research. The problem was that we did not yet have the terminology to accurately express these concerns. With a few prompts from our lecturer and a lot of group discussion we were able to isolate our main concerns with the data collection and its storage. For some of us, this was the learning moment of the class.

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Because [the residents] were not given the knowledge of what his research was all about they couldn’t actually weigh their consent. They didn’t know if what they said would be included or not be included. Even JT [the gang leader] himself thought Venkatesh was writing a book and his consent is definitely not [informed]. They didn’t know what he was writing.

What Venkatesh needed to do to avert most of his ethical problems was gain informed consent and the residents’ voluntary participation and the consent of JT to collect information specifically about him. Each had the right to privacy. However, this was reliant on him knowing what he was doing and when he began his project his research goals were not clearly formed, meaning informing others of his research was not possible. We decided issues of confidentiality and the storage of data, which would have demonstrated his respect from the subjects, and their data were secondary in this ethical hierarchy.

Ethics on the run

The second sociological bestseller the lecturer had us read was Alice Goffman’s ethnography On the Run, a book that we found to be very similar to Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day. Goffman’s research involved her living for extended periods of time in a black innercity area and collecting field notes via interview and participant observation (Goffman, 2014). Eventually her research coalesced around the Sixth Street gang who spent their time dipping and dodging with the police (Goffman, 2014). While we found the book a fascinating insight into the racial tensions that affect street life, we quickly identified serious ethical issues, almost all of which mirrored those found in Gang Leader for a Day. This included the absence of informed consent, breaches of internal and external confidenti- ality, and problems with the security of the data. Like Venkatesh, Alice Goffman’s work demonstrated how qualitative research in her initial unsupervised stages could go wrong when little prior planning is undertaken concerning the welfare of those individuals and communities involved in the study. Although Goffman’s approach initially seemed to be more thoughtful than Venkatesh’s, it soon became clear to us that she had not thought through ethical issues in the planning stages of her research. For example, she did not gain the voluntary consent of the family she tutored even though she wanted to write notes on her experience with them.

We have come to understand through our ongoing group discussions that the iterative and emergent nature of ethnographic studies makes it challenging for ethnographers like Goffman to fully inform her participants of the nature of her research. However, this does not preclude an initial consent. Like Venkatesh, the intentions of Goffman’s research were not clear either to her or her participants at the outset. She only made that discovery as she was collating her field notes. What Goffman could have done was to inform the parents of the children she was collecting field notes on and ask them if that was okay. She gave no evidence that she did that.

As we read further, we noted in Alice Goffman’s methodological statement she was following a set of methodological guidelines written pre-Belmont and the lecturer encouraged us to follow this lead into what effectively constituted a sociological time warp. Alice Goffman’s reliance on her father Erving Goffman’s work, On Fieldwork (Lofland, 1989) saw her adopt this methodological advice despite the fact her father was writing in an era where ethics review was not mandatory. This lack of awareness of the evolution of ethical fieldwork did not assist Alice Goffman; she made no effort to reference a modern, updated frame of ethics nor had she sought formal ethics approval. On Fieldwork (Lofland, 1989) advocates the researcher cutting off ties during the research process:

Now the next thing you have to do is cut your life to the bone, as much as you can afford to cut it down. Except for a few murder mysteries or something you can bring along in case you get really depressed, remove yourself from all resources. (Lofland, 1989, p. 127)

You have to anticipate being questioned by people whom you study so you engage in providing a story that will hold up should the facts be brought to their attention. So you engage in what are sometimes called ‘telling practices’ … So you have to get some story that will be – I like a story such that if they find out what you are doing, the story you presented could not be an absolute lie. If they don’t find out what you’re doing, the story you presented doesn’t get in your way (Lofland, 1989, pp. 126, 127).

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This methodological frame was a subject of considerable discussion for the class, as we had to reconcile her minimal efforts to gain some form of informed consent with her liberal use of a piece of work that advocated telling practices or deception that did not recognise the autonomy or privacy of research subjects.

From our discussions we came to agree that if researchers set out with a framework that did not start with informed consent, they are all but guaranteed to generate other ethical issues in their research. This is readily apparent in the two cases (Goffman, 2014; Venkatesh, 2008) we’ve discussed so far. In Venkatesh’s and Goffman’s case they present no evidence they were working from any ethical framework, which in turn explains how Venkatesh ended up in situations where he harmed tenants and potentially put his life in danger. Goffman, on the other hand, employed a methodology that undermined subjects’ autonomy when collecting data without consent.

We were encouraged to search the Internet for reactions to ‘On the Run’. In all, there were 266,000 Google entries as of May 9, 2016. Clearly others were interested in this book. We picked up on two key issues. The first is the Internet’s ‘Trial of Alice Goffman’ which accuses her of taking part in a potential drive-by murder, particularly when one takes her narrative at face value.

While the legality of her role in this incident is subject to debate, we were more concerned with her double role as both a researcher in the field and as Chuck’s friend who had the desire for ‘Chuck’s killer to die’ (Goffman, 2014). Accepting Goffman’s story exactly the way she tells it, she has clearly violated the ethical principle of ‘do no harm.’ In this case we decided that she had caused herself harm by putting herself in a dangerous position.

I recall the most interesting moment in class was when Goffman was driving the gatekeeper of the Sixth Street boys, Mike, who was carrying a loaded gun. ‘What was she thinking?’ I thought out loud. Many of my fellow classmates agreed and saw this incident as a dangerous and illegal one. I could not help but see the parallels between Goffman’s actions to those of Venkatesh’s: the naivety, the recklessness and the lack of ethical awareness.

The second issue was that despite Goffman’s efforts to use pseudonyms (and to some extent to skew the identity of her research site) in her attempt to protect the identity of her informants, she failed to consider how the ‘smallness’ of the Sixth Street community might also undermine the concept of confidentiality in her research. Reporters, it turned out, had taken a photograph of Goffman to this area and been able to locate the Sixth Street boys by knocking on a door in the area, showing a photo of Goffman, claiming to be a friend of hers and asking where they might find her (McQuade 2015). This was a particularly troubling issue for us, as confidentiality is one of the key protections within academic research that is frequently breached (Scheper-Hughes, 2000; Vidich & Bensman, 1968; Whyte 1943/1981). In being unaware of the limits of confidentiality Goffman acted as a beacon to third parties. Not only were par- ticipants denied informed consent; they were extended few ethical protections such as confidentiality.

In discussing the concept of internal confidentiality a third book, Carolyn Ellis (1986) Fisherfolk of Chesapeake Bay, came into the frame. The class did not read Fisherfolk but focused on Ellis’s’ (1995) candid Emotional and ethical quagmires in returning to the field where she discussed how her research unravelled by her use of an unsophicated psedonym coding process. Ellis’s pseudonyms were similar to the participants’ real names in order to make their later identification easier for herself.

[Ellis’] strategy of inventing pseudonyms starting with the same letters as the double names of the Fishneckers and having other similarities in sound had made it easy to keep names straight, but at the cost of making it convenient for Fishneckers to figure out the characters in my story. (Ellis, 1995, p. 78)

Ellis assumed her participants would not read her work, as many of them were illiterate. When parts of her book were read to those who she had assumed would remain ignorant of the text the text breached internal confidentiality. Participants easily identified who had said what to Ellis.

While we acknowledge a reviewer’s comment ‘maintaining internal confidentiality is easier said than done’ the reviewer missed the point of our criticism being not an end in itself but representing learning for our future research.

Maintaining internal confidentiality is easier said than done, unless one can prevent informants from getting access to the book, which would presumably itself be unethical. Fortunately or unfortunately, most people who have been studied don’t know or care about research publications.

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The lesson this reviewer is suggesting is not sound. We read and agreed with Tolich (2010) that ethnographers, even auto ethnographers, should assume the informants would read the book. This was an assumption Ellis did not make. Nothing can restore this predicament but as future researchers there is much for us to learn from Ellis and the two other authors.

Ellis’ return to the Fisherfolk completes an interesting circle alongside Venkatesh and Goffman. These three cases by junior researchers illustrated to us the harm caused when basic ethical consid- erations are overlooked during the ethics in practice phase of research. We noted that Ellis became much more cognizant of the ethical issues posed by her original study of the Fisherfolk in the years following its publication. It will be interesting to see if Venkatesh and Goffman follow the same pattern and discuss the ethical issues raised by their research. Yet it is important to remember that it is not just junior researchers who make ethical mistakes, as the Vice Chancellor of one of New Zealand’s seven Universities recently demonstrated.

Conclusion

The format of the first four weeks of the Qualitative Research Ethics class enabled us to think and do ethics out loud, at a distance appropriate to our stage as fledgling researchers. Our journey started with a simple enough question, ‘Is this [recording device] ethical?’ Along the way we have dealt with feelings of, ‘that’s not right …’ and through interpreting these gut instincts against a framework of ethical concepts we now have the confidence to say ‘that is not ethical and here’s why …’ The autonomy of all those who take part in research should be respected by asking in advance if they volunteer to take part after learning what the aims are of the research. Researchers also need to provide assurances that they will take all steps necessary to ensure that no harm will befall those who volunteer to take part in the research and their identity and information will be protected. To that end we learned that there were limits on confidentiality and informants could read materials that allowed them to identify themselves and others, even though those external to the study may be oblivious to the study site. By drilling down to that next level of understanding, it became easier to see how the concepts could be applied in our own research. Through the readings for the class, we learned much more about the nuances of ethics.

Although our journey has been short, it has also been rich. Our experience has been engrossing, confronting, refreshing, empowering, and has piqued our interest in new areas of study and research. We have made new friends and are becoming trusted colleagues. But most importantly, through our increasingly candid exchanges in class we have been introduced to our ethical selves.

Preparing for qualitative research, it turns out, can begin successfully in the company of strangers. It can be transformative. Individual recollections included:

The narratives provided to us were realistic scenarios that helped us to identify the gap that exists between procedural ethics and ethics in practice.

In some ways, the experience mirrored how we should be proceeding when we are actually doing ethics in prac- tice – the course allowed for quick-fire attention to big ideas, changing tack when something wasn’t working, and also valuing what everyone in the room was bringing to our discussions.

Short of taking to the field ourselves I am yet to experience a more engaging, reflexive, or palpable way of pre- paring for qualitative social research. After just a few weeks I am more alert to the kinds of ethical moments I might face in practice, and feel increasingly well equipped to respond to them.

We left Goffman’s apartment with knowledge and experience of ethics in the field, rather than coming out with a memorised list of ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ but no real understanding of what it all means in practice.

The lecturer wanted to know if this was a good way to learn research ethics. We assured him, as we hope we have convinced the reader, that it was. The lecturer told us at the start of the class, when introducing the Vice Chancellor’s wayward research, that while we were reading we would know some- thing was wrong, but not always be sure what. It is these gut feelings that we then took, discussed and debated until we were able to reflexively understand the ethical dilemmas behind our intuitions. This

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allowed us to move from ‘There is something wrong with this’ and ultimately to ‘This is what is wrong, this is why it is wrong, and this is what could have been done to make it better.’ We had established an ability to think critically about the works that we were reading so as to apply that critical thinking to our own research practices.

Guillemin and Gillam (2004) argue that researchers should bring reflexivity to their ethical practice in the field, yet this only works when researchers are adequately informed and have a strategy when things do not go quite to plan. We demonstrated to ourselves during the first weeks of the course that the sociologists’ capacity for reflexivity begins with taking the time to consider the experience of others ahead of anything else. In this sense we are indebted to Venkatesh, Goffman and Ellis for providing such a rich learning environment through such engaging ethnographic narratives. The other learning we took from these novice sociologists was how to write in the narrative form. This was something that we all struggled with as a class, due to that style not being fostered in academia. We slowly learned how to write narratively, but these sociologists never managed to learn the basics of ethics that were so intuitively obvious to us.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors Martin Tolich is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology Gender and Social Work at the University of Otago. He is currently co-editing a Sage Handbook on qualitative research ethics. The five students who co-authored this article were enrolled in a qualitative research ethics postgraduate course as part of their BA honours in sociology or gender.

Louisa Choe and David Wither have gone on to enrol in a PhD program in sociology at the University of Otago.

Rachel Shaw is enrolled there in an MA in gender studies.

Amy Shaw and Adam Doesburg have opted for a gap year prior to continuing their postgraduate studies.

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