Revisiting "Strategies for addressing ethical concerns in action research" Mary Brydon-Miller

In 2006 Davydd Greenwood, Olav Eikeland, and I edited a special issue of ARJ focused on ethics and AR. We concluded that special issue with a short list of proposals for “encouraging greater attention to and depth of reflection on the quetsion of ethics and action resrac and the challenges this presents” (p. 130). Over the next few weeks, I want to revisit that list of recommendations and consider what progress has been made in implementing some of our suggestions, and how we might continue to move forward to address the concerns raised there. I’ll start this week by considering the final category, the challenges facing “journal editors, conference organizers, reviewers, and others with leadership roles both within the academy and in community organizations”. We suggested the following:




· “encourage authors and presenters to include an honest discussion of the ethical challenges they faced in the process of conducting their research;



· devote special attention to a consideration of ethical issues in research by hosting conferences, developing special issues of academic journals, and encouraging other forms of scholarship examining these concerns; and



· develop venues for more inclusive discussions of research so that pertinent information reaches a broader audience.”



I wish I could say that I thought we’d accomplished all of these goals. But while I see progress, I think there is much that remains to be done. While some authors do address these issues, we have yet to develop a policy that requires or even strongly encourages authors to incorporate a discussion of ethics into the manuscripts they submit to ARJ.



In terms of conferences, I do know that we will be offering a symposium at the upcoming World Congress of Action Research focused on ethics and AR, and considering specific ways in which we might incorporate a more critical examination of the ethical implications of our work across the action research process. And there are extremely useful discussions of research ethics generally in publications including the Handbook of Social Research Ethics, the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, and Teaching Ethics, all of which have or are considering incorporating discussions of action research.



And, of course, my hope is that this section of the ARJ Community blog, will serve as a sounding board for discussions of the ethical challenges of action research. We’d welcome hearing your comments, questions, strategies, and challenges.

Reciprocity, Relationship, and Covenantal Ethics - Mary Brydon-Miller

In their article, “Reciprocity:  An Ethic for Community-based Participatory Action Research”, authors Sarah Maiter, Laura Simich, Nora Jacobson, and Julie Wise define reciprocity as “an ongoing process of exchange with the aim of establishing and maintaining equality between parties” and explore how this notion might inform our understanding of the ethical implications of community-based participatory action research.

This concept of reciprocity relates closely to the idea of community covenantal ethics that I’ve been exploring in some of my own recent work.  I first came across the concept of covenantal ethics in the work of my friend Anne Inga Hilsen (include link to Arj, 4(1), 23-36) in which she cites the work of William May, a physician whose book, The Physician’s Covenant lays out some basic principles of covenantal ethics.  Anne Inga describes how this informs her work as an action researcher, “I suggest that AR can also be seen as a covenant between the researchers and the local participants.  Instead of doing good to serve my own needs or act as rational contractual action, I will argue that AR, from my position, can be seen as entering into a covenant with the local participants” (2006, 27-28). 

This covenant is founded in the notions of reciprocity and relationship.  In their article, Maiter and her colleagues provide a very clear and complete discussion of how they designed and carried out a community-based participatory action research project designed to examine the issue of mental health care among diverse communities in Ontario, Canada. At the same time, they also help to deepen our thinking of the ethical implications of our work as action researchers

Brydon-Miller, M. (2009).  Covenantal ethics and action research:  Exploring a common foundation for social research.  In D. Mertens & P. Ginsberg (Eds.), The Handbook of Social Research Ethics (pp. 243-258).  Los Angeles: SAGE Publications.

May, W. F. (2000).  The physician’s covenant:  Images of the healer in medical ethics (2^nd ed.).  Louisville, KY:  Westminster John Knox Press.