Research ethics: deception, safety and confidentiality

Research ethics: deception, safety and confidentiality

Although criminological ethnographers enjoyed a measure of freedom until the early twenty-first century, now they are compelled to negotiate ethical problems under the guidance of university institutions that specialize in research ethics (see Murphy and Dingwall, 2001). Perhaps the most difficult amongst these problems are deception, safety and confidentiality.

These issues can be extremely difficult for a criminological researcher. For instance, it is illegal to withhold information concerning crimes from the police. Where research proposals have been regarded as too risky or impossible to resolve, they have been refused permission by Ethics Committees (UK), Institutional Review Boards (USA) or Human Research Ethics Committees (Australia). Some ethnographers have had no choice but to take unpaid leave and go it alone (see, for example, Nordstrom, 2007). At the political level, insti- tutionalized ethics can serve the interests of incumbent ideological power by preventing the type of research projects that might reveal uncomfortable truths. Winlow and Hall (2012; see also Israel, 2014) identified Ethics Committees as bureaucratic substitutes for what should be an organic culture of ethics repro- duced by the researchers themselves. These committees have little to do with ethics but operate as a form of ‘risk management’, confiscating ethics and poli- tics from researchers to minimize risks and maintain the image of the corporate university.

Guillemin and Gillam (2004) distinguish between procedural ethics and ethics in practice. The former are formal and restrictive whereas the latter are flexible and improvised. They argue that most situations in research settings are too complex and ambivalent for formal ethics; therefore the responsibility to remain faithful to ethical values should be returned to the researcher. Sandberg and Copes (2012) offer a com- promise. After interviewing 15 researchers in the drug field to discern common ethical problems, they acknowledged that the researcher must make ethical and practical decisions on the ground as the research progresses, but the research com- munity itself needs to establish its own ‘standing decisions’, based on forethought and common knowledge, as guidance. Yet many funders, university committees and even researchers themselves remain uncomfortable with such autonomy and moral flexibility on the ground and out of constant regulatory reach (Yates, 2004).

Insiders/Outsiders

Standard sociological ethnographies tend to be conducted in communities that are quite open and welcoming, and which can often benefit from the research, but, for criminologists, suspicion and secrecy are perennial problems. Individuals involved in crime or violence, and those policing offenders or supervising them in prisons, gener- ally have little to gain from researchers, therefore they tend to be cautious about granting access to the research field, striking up relationships, allowing participant observation, acting as key informants or offering detailed and truthful information. This issue often invokes the crucial question of whether ‘outsiders’ or ‘insiders’ are

the most effective researchers. The standard arguments about the advantages and disadvantages of using outsiders or insiders tend to be overwhelmed by the banal but crucial issue that crimes carry penalties; therefore unless a very high level of trust is established participants will conceal the true extent of their activities from outsiders. Even where trust seems to have been established, the researcher can never be quite sure that all motivations, practices and consequences are being revealed. Some argue that, in many cases, the insider is often the only researcher capable of accessing, revealing and understanding the concealed but rich and nuanced cultural practices that pervade those communities involved in crime, criminal markets or crime control (Ancrum, 2013; Ho, 2009).

Insiders will usually already have more complete and intimate knowledge of the field, but of course the insider must be a true active insider rather than a passive inhabitant of the field whose knowledge claims might be hearsay, exaggerations or fabrications. A true insider might be over-familiar with the setting and suffer from ‘over-rapport’ with its inhabitants and a subsequent tendency to dismiss the subtle nuances of meaning and practice that the outsider might recognize as significant (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995). However, accusations of ‘over-rapport’ are pos- sibly based on worries that insiders, benefiting from more access, trust and understanding, might reveal realities that will disrupt the cosy paradigms that social scientists rely on to theorize their data (Ancrum, 2013). Paradoxically, because the long-running moral injunction to appreciate others weighs heavily on outsiders, par- ticularly if they are from a more privileged background, insiders can achieve more critical distance because they are not hampered by this moral injunction – one has to know something intimately to be truly and incisively critical of it. An insider can be trained to recognize the important in the familiar, whereas denial of access to the outsider is more fundamentally problematic, but then again outsiders can overcome this with good key informants and sheer persistence. The debate goes on with no obvious closure in sight, but it tends to omit the fact that there is rarely one researcher. An outsider and an insider working together, either both active in the field or with the outsider as director and interlocutor, can often make a useful com- bination, balancing the critiques and teasing out the commonalities that are essential to eventual theory building. This merger of two horizons can introduce an active and ongoing dialectic into the research process.

The most serious problem for the criminological ethnographer is that the duty to

disclose criminal activity often precludes ethnography’s most fundamental method – participant observation. This method was once possible as researchers accompanied minor criminals as they committed non-violent crimes, but institutional control has rendered it virtually extinct. Although Winlow’s (2001) study was one of the first to present a truly reflexive-realist account of violent crime, it was, ironically, also one of the last ethnographic research projects to involve direct and enduring participant observation of violent crime. Insider researchers and key informants can help with access to limited participant observation in the vicinity of crimes but never with the act of committing or planning a crime, because this would automatically trigger the

ethical imperative to disclose. This applies to actors in criminal markets as well as institutional settings such as police stations or prisons. Criminological ethnogra- phers, forced to find a substitute for direct participant observation, have come to rely on the retrospective narratives of those who have already witnessed criminal activity as associates, onlookers or victims, or on the reminiscences of ex-offenders whose convictions are already spent. To some, this type of criminological ethnography is not a proper ethnography at all, but a series of interviews carried out by researchers who can operate in the locale where crimes are committed, and therefore get a fla- vour of the research setting and its broader social, economic and cultural contexts, but never actually observe them as significant social events. To enrich this second- hand data, criminological ethnographers must develop their skills in accessing research settings, gaining trust, finding key informants, expanding the informant group by means of snowball sampling, and conducting sequences of interviews in progressively more depth.