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Ethical Issues in Educational Research

Ethics in educational research are multifaceted, contextual, emergent, and relational; considering ethics critically requires attention to the procedural and transactional as well as the relational and sociopolitical. Ethical and valid research necessitates that educational researchers understand and approach their roles with humility and carefully consider these issues.

This entry begins by discussing ethical issues that are embedded in research processes and relationships including researcher reflexivity, the expert–learner binary, the relational approach to research, research boundaries, and reciprocity. It then describes processes used so that research conforms to ethical standards, including institutional review boards (IRBs), ethics committees, and codes of ethics. The entry concludes by examining the concepts of informed consent and assent and looking at the differences between confidentiality and anonymity and the challenges to these forms of privacy in a digital world.

The Ethical Dimensionsof Researcher Reflexivity

Given the researcher’s central role in the development, implementation, and dissemination of educational research, it is an ethical imperative for researchers to consider the implications of their role throughout the research process. Critically engaging with and challenging interpretations, and the biases and societal or organizational structures that shape them, constitutes an especially important set of considerations in educational research. Addressing this ethical responsibility requires a reflexive approach to research that has at its core an equity stance.

When researchers acknowledge that they are socialized into specific ways of viewing the world, which include their ideologies, biases, belief systems, assumptions, and prejudices, they must not only acknowledge but must also actively monitor their subjectivities and how these influence and mediate their research. The following subsections provide specific areas of researcher reflexivity with particular ethical dimensions.

Pushing Against the “Expert–Learner Binary”

Sociopolitical contexts (macro and micro) influence research contexts and research dynamics and relationships. As a part of an ethical stance, educational researchers should consider how these larger forces manifest themselves in research goals, processes, and interactions and then specifically within and across data collection and analysis processes. Many contemporary researchers argue for an approach that situates research participants as “experts of their own experiences,” meaning that everyone involved brings wisdom and generates knowledge. While this may sound obvious, it is a departure from how research often happens.

This stance requires researchers to work to become sufficiently comfortable with the uncertainties that arise from engaging in processes that decenter codified knowledge (i.e., knowledge valued in the Western academy) and expertise by allowing time and space for mutual evaluations and conversations that strive for balance and equity in reconciling what are sometimes divergent expectations and interpretations (whether among different researchers or between researchers and research participants). Research is often built on an expert–learner binary—that is, an assumption that researchers are more knowledgeable and expert, and participants are viewed, and sometimes even view themselves, as passive recipients of this information and the research process overall rather than as knowledge generators in their own right. This, of course, is ethically problematic.

Relational Ethics: Taking a Relational Approach to Research

To push against forces that dehumanize, generalize, and “other” people, educational researchers can commit to an inquiry stance on research. This requires, among other things, taking a relational stance on research. This approach, which emerged from feminist research methodology, critically examines the relational dynamics between researchers and participants (and between participants) in relation to broader social forces. The relational aspects of the research process (and product in terms of how data are analyzed and participants are represented in written accounts), with its methodological attunement to and address of issues of power, identity, and the need to contextualize interaction and data, are at the heart of a relational approach to research.

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