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Research Ethics in Biographical Research
Research Ethics in Biographical Research
Thursday, 19 July 2018: 08:30-10:20
Location: 205A (MTCC NORTH BUILDING)
RC38 Biography and Society (host committee) Language: English
Doing research and data analysis on the basis of biographical narrative interviews has been very productive in different sociological areas, such as migration studies, psychosocial and medical contexts, and other research areas that relate to transitory or liminal life situations and experience. However, doing biographical research in transitional, transnational and transcultural research settings involves various ethical challenges, for example in the research field of migration and refugee studies and also in psychosocial research. Here, researchers have to reflect and adequately deal with a number of ethical questions and challenges in the field research process, especially in doing field research and biographical-narrative interviews among – potentially – vulnerable groups, such as refugees or (ex-) psychiatric patients. The different challenges concern the research relationship or research alliance, with regard to questions of trust, power hierarchies, and mutual as well as differing interests concerning research questions, aims, and procedures; furthermore, questions regarding “informed consent” as an ongoing process and a dialogue; the notion of authenticity and truth of the narrated life stories; issues of confidentiality and anonymization of the data, and last but not least questions concerning the archiving of biographical data and the (political) consequences for secondary analysis.
For this panel we invite social scientists who are working with biographical methods to present and discuss the ethical challenges they have encountered in their research practice.
Session Organizers:
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Oral Presentations
Distributed Papers