Читать книгу An Introduction to Evaluation - Chris Fox - Страница 60

Smith et al. (2010) emphasise that:

[I]n PAR, professional researchers do not enter communities to conduct studies on community members. Rather, they form partnerships with community members to identify issues of local importance, develop ways of studying them, collect and interpret data, and take action on the resulting knowledge. (Smith et al. 2010: 407–8)

Ethical issues arise from this total immersion of the researcher/evaluator in the context which they are researching/evaluating. Again, the most obvious one here is informed consent. As in the case of cluster-randomised trials, participatory action research involves working with a group of individuals or communities. The challenge is greater in the case of PAR. Cluster-randomised trials work with a fixed number of research subjects that remain the same throughout the evaluation. In PAR, research subjects with whom the evaluator interacts may change. This poses obvious challenges to the ethical principle of voluntary participation; members of the group or community are not so aware that they are part in a study. This reflection is not at the front of their minds when interacting with the evaluator. Perhaps in many cases if this was the case, they might have decided not to volunteer information.

The evaluator’s immersion in many cases demands a more flexible approach to information gathering that is not confined to private exchanges as in the context of semi-structured interviews. Anonymity and confidentiality may also be at stake and there are other ethical-methodological issues that may also arise:

including defining what counts as a ‘community’; the potential for conflict between individual and group interests; how to modify informed consent to take account of group characteristics; and issues of who best represents a group or community. (Durham Community Research Team 2011: 8)

Finally, issues may arise with regard to power asymmetry and the ‘blurring of the boundaries’ in PAR. PAR proponents often mention evaluators’ ability to best apprehend power relations by being immersed in the group or community. Nevertheless, evaluators may be unable to see themselves as part of this configuration and understand both their bias and how they are seen by others (i.e. others’ bias towards them). Additionally, evaluators may struggle to remain impartial and thus side with one side of the argument, thereby blurring the boundaries between evaluator/member of the group/community (Durham Community Research Team 2011).

From the above, it seems likely that all ethical guiding principles are sensitive to methods’ implementation. Moreover, regardless of where a method sits on the quantitative/qualitative continuum ethical challenges seem to be rather common. The issue is therefore to identify what can be done in order to ensure the integrity of the principles.