Ethical Research and Phenomenology

One of the readings for last Tuesday’s Core 2 class, Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research by Clifford G. Christians, posed a lot of questions about improving the IRB system, and at first I didn’t know why he would question the IRB process of receiving approval for conducting research.  Now, having read the article and gone to class to discuss it, I can see how for the type of research I’ll be conducting for this class, it really doesn’t fit.  One of the requirements needed for completing an IRB application is to prepare a list of questions that have to be approved of before the researcher can begin to conduct interviews.

The only problem with that is we can’t ask questions that we come up with on the spot…which is not good.

So, where does that leave my classmates and me?  Dr. Wolff had the solution: we’re not going through the IRB, which means we don’t have to fill out one of those exhaustive and extensive IRB applications!  Hooray!

Another article that we read was an excerpt from a book called Qualitative Inquiry & Research Design by John W. Creswell that explored the five different approaches to qualitative research.  One of them, phenomenology, sounded like it would fit perfectly my topic.  That is until I hit a pretty major snag in the description: “…investigators set aside their experiences, as much as possible, to make a fresh perspective toward the phenomenon under examination” (p 59-60).

Well, that’s not going to work.

While my topic does fit most of the criteria preferred for phenomenological research, it would be kind of impossible for me to separate out my experiences because my research will be primarily based on them.  And those experiences will fuel the creative piece that I’ll turn in at the end of the semester.

Yet again, Dr. Wolff came to the rescue.  He told us that having us try to narrow our research to fit into a specific set of criteria would be counterproductive; my last blog post discussed how my classmates and I are trying to expand the scopes of our research topics to obtain the most information possible.

So take that, research experts!

This type of research is all about operating outside of our comfort zones, beyond the limitations of typical research.  It’s all about thinking outside the box.  And our research will be better for it.