8310 Dis 2 week 10

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Assignment Task Part 2- Colleague Response

· Respond to at least one of your colleagues’ posts in a 150 word response and explain what you found in your search related to protecting privacy, minimizing harm, and respecting the shared experiences of others.

· Provide a suggestion for overcoming the ethical challenge your colleague addressed in their post.

· Use the article you found in your search to support your response. Use proper APA format, citations, and referencing.

Karin Detweiler 

            Protecting the privacy of participants needs to be followed during all study procedures, including coding (Saldaña, 2021). A history of unethical or harmful studies required several changes in the research world, including the creation of the institutional review board (IRB) (Ravitch & Carl, 2021). To ensure the principle of do no harm with study participants, it is important that the researcher(s) keeps all promises made (Rubin & Rubin, 2012). It is also necessary to explain the purpose of the study, how the data will be used, how participant confidentiality and anonymity will be protected, and to answer any questions, to the best of the researcher’s ability, any questions that the participants may have (Ravitch & Carl, 2021; Rubin & Rubin, 2012). Ethics require that any participant has the option to skip any questions, give incomplete answers, or even leave the study at any time (Lambert, 2012; Ravitch & Carl, 2021; Rubin & Rubin, 2012). Simply stated, informed and voluntary consent is a core principle for most research studies (Lambert, 2012; Morse & Coulehan, 2015; Ravitch & Carl, 2021).

            It is necessary to “exercise ethical caution” (Saldaña, 2021, p. 167) when interviewing participants, especially when the questions may trigger sensitive topics and emotions (Rubin & Rubin, 2012; Saldaña, 2021). The participants are the owners of their experiences (Rubin & Rubin, 2012), and have the right to expect respect from the researcher. Because of the smaller sample sizes in qualitative research, there can be ethical challenges to protecting participant privacy (Morse & Coulehan, 2015). To address this concern, Morse and Coulehan (2015) suggest not publishing a table showing participants’ demographics but instead showing ranges (including the mean if the sample is large enough). It is also suggested to remove any codes that may give clues to a participant’s identity (Morse & Coulehan, 2015). In an effort to maintain ethical transparency concerning privacy, measures to protect privacy and any possible privacy concerns should be included within the informed consent form (Burkholder et al., 2020).

 

References:

Burkholder, G. J., Cox, K. A., Crawford, L. M., & Hitchcock, J. H. (Eds.). (2020). Research designs and methods: An applied guide for the scholar-practitioner. Sage.

Lambert, M. (2012). A beginner’s guide to doing your education research project. Sage.

Morse, J. M., & Coulehan, J. (2015). Maintaining confidentiality in qualitative publications. Qualitative Health Research, 25(2), 151–152.

Ravitch, S. M., & Carl, N. M. (2021). Qualitative research: Bridging the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological (2nd ed.) Sage Publications.

Rubin, H. J., & Rubin, I. S. (2012). Qualitative interviewing: The art of hearing data (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Saldaña, J. (2021). The coding manual for qualitative researchers (4th ed.). Sage Publications.