Integrity in Qualitative Research

Politics of Integrity

Balancing rights and responsibilities in the qualitative research process entails equalizing the search for knowledge with concerns about vulnerability, confidentiality, and intrusion in the lives of participants. [Page 441]These concerns are connected to the power dynamics that are likely to be present in research, and they relate not only to the power relationship between researchers and participants but also to that between researchers and funding bodies/host institutions. There is much in the literature about the personal empowerment of research participants through their contribution to heightening awareness about a particular social issue, but there is less about the empowerment of researchers that can be constrained and sometimes disenfranchised by the requirements imposed by research funders. These requirements can intrude into and color both research conduct and output, with researchers feeling obliged to take account of the political positioning of funding bodies. This suggests that acting with integrity is not a linear construct but rather points to the reality of ethical research practice that is complex and often multifaceted.

Working with participants who are unsympathetic or resistant to the aims of a research project can challenge both the integrity and resilience of researchers and can be stressful for both parties. This raises the question of whether integrity can be seen as conditional and, if so, what are the caveats or constraints that inhibit full openness. Examples from the feminist literature illustrate that the “ideological distance” between researchers and their participants can be bridged by revealment strategies on the part of the researchers that are partial, staged, and characterized by reference to the more general rather than the highly detailed and specific. In some circumstances, full openness must be sacrificed to the needs of completing research effectively, and this may involve some measure of unexplication of researchers' agendas. This does not signify the collapse of ethical rigor; rather, it points to relative and contextual understandings of “truth telling” that inscribe empirical work within the human and social sciences. Integrity is itself a social construct that cannot be self-serving if it is to be an effective safeguard for researchers and participants alike within sociological research. Ethical research processes, to be meaningful, must be pragmatic and responsive to the circumstances of the research, and the adoption of a narrow purist model may leave areas of human experience hidden and neglected.

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