Abstract
Ethics in research can be broadly divided into two epistemic dimensions. One dimension focuses on bureaucratic procedures (i.e., procedural ethics), while the other focuses on contextually and culturally contested practice of ethics in research (i.e., ethics in practice). Researchers experience both dimensions distinctly in their qualitative research. The review of ethics in prospective research through bureaucratic procedures aims to measure compliance with documented requirements relating to research participants, data management, consent, and ensure researchers can demonstrate their ethical competence before they commence their research. However, researchers often experience unanticipated ethical issues within the context of their research; sometimes ethics-related situations, including language sensitivity, cultural humility, and data processing experienced by researchers can be very different from what was included in bureaucratic procedures. In this study, phenomena related to research ethics in practice, as experienced by social scientists (n = 5) in their qualitative research, are hermeneutically explored and interpreted. The selected phenomena represent the researchers’ lived experiences regarding the practice of participant autonomy, specifically exploring participants’ right to withdraw from research. These phenomena are interpreted from the theoretical perspectives of situational relativism and self-determined autonomy. The interpreted phenomena reveal the current practices in ethical management of data collected from participants before their decision to withdraw from research (i.e., withdrawal data), are predominantly focused on tangible forms of data (i.e., the information that can easily be distinguished from other data), but ethical concerns associated with intangible forms of data are often neglected. The intangible forms of data are experiential knowing and understanding that include, feeling, emotion, courage, respect, celebration, anger, and the sense of being and belonging. The study recommends that researchers and research professionals should exercise ethical sensitivity and humility towards intangible forms of data collected during qualitative research when participants withdraw their consent.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the University Grants Commission (UGC) Nepal for the MPhil Fellowship-Young. I am thankful to MPhil supervisor, Dr. Roshan Thapa for his supervisory guidance. I am also thankful to Dr. Sarah Elaine Eaton and Dr. Irene Glendinning for their critical comments and suggestions in the early version of the manuscript. My thanks also go to my MPhil and PhD classmates (Buddi, Sanam, and Sophia) for their writing encouragement. I would like to express my thanks to anonymous reviewers whose feedback was invaluable.
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This manuscript is prepared based on author’s Master of Philosophy-MPhil dissertation dated 2022 titled Research Ethics: Social Scientists’ Lived Experience. Narratives in this manuscript are resembled or replicated from the unpublished MPhil dissertation.
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Dahal, B. Participants’ Right to Withdraw from Research: Researchers’ Lived Experiences on Ethics of Withdrawal. J Acad Ethics 22, 191–209 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-024-09513-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-024-09513-y