III. Field Conduct

Tips:
• „Review the existing empirical (field) literature on your topic
• What were the limitations of those studies?
• What were the problems they faced?
• Will you be able to avoid the same? _{(PERCS 2018)}

Point to ponder:
• How can we predict some of the possible ethical pitfalls before we even start our research endeavour? _{(PERCS 2018)}

In a blog on her fieldwork in the transgender pornography industry in two American cities, Sophie Pezzutto, an anthropology PhD candidate, reflects on where to draw personal lines:

• “Where do I as an ethnographer draw the line between career and personal wellbeing at home and in the field? How much participation is ‘enough’ to get me sufficiently high-quality data?”
• [..]The anthropologist’s dedication to ‘participation’ –to truly understand, to throw off the false lab coat of objectivity and get involved –is one of the discipline’s strong suits. It had always attracted me.
• At the same time, however, the trope of the anthropologist-adventurer is so pervasive, that choosing a safer methodology or more ‘mundane’ field site regularly evokes feelings of guilt.” [Pezzutto 2019]
• -> Sophie in the end found her line and succeeded with her research….
• The German working group on Medical Anthropology recommends: “If dangers come to pass that might gravely affect one’s physical or psychological health, responsibility towards oneself means that one should seriously consider terminating the research.”(AG Medical Anthropology.2005.)

• In interviews with 16 young PhD candidates on difficulties in fieldwork Amy Pollard identified 16 ‘feelings’ of being: “alone, ashamed, bereaved, betrayed, depressed, desperate, disappointed, disturbed, embarrassed, fearful, frustrated, guilty, harassed, homeless, paranoid, regretful, silenced, stressed, trapped, uncomfortable, unprepared, unsupported, and unwell.” _{(Pollard 2009: 1)}
• Her paper elaborates on every one of these feelings and “[..]concludes with a set of questions for prospective fieldworkers,a reflection on the dilemmasfaced by supervisors and university departments, and a proposal for action.” _{(Pollard 2009: 1)}

Tip:
Check if there is an organization in your home country, such as the Centre for Safety and Development in the Netherlands, that offers safety and security courses for professionals before their employment abroad.
_{(see: https://centreforsafety.org/universities-research-institutes/ ,C. Jacobs oral inf.)}

“I moved into a small room in New York. [..] In the morning I wanted to have a coffee in the drug store across the street. I stood at the bar. Most people drank their coffee standing up and reading their newspaper. The (waiter) looked at me, pushed his lower lip slightly over his upper lip and raised his chin. I recognized the gesture as a sign and called out to him: ‘A coffee please … without sugar and a little milk only’. A brief rattle and clatter of dishes, cutlery and machines: In front of me stood a glass of light brown, sugared coffee. In the following days all my attempts to have my way failed. After the word ‘coffee’ the waiter turned away before I had even finished my sentence about sugar and milk, and the same drink was always standing in front of me. Then one morning it dawned on me that I could do it differently. When the waiter wanted to serve me, I said loud and clear: ‘Look , I`m a foreigner’. The effect was amazing. The people next to me looked up from their newspapers and looked at me while the waiter waited somewhat perplexed to hear what I was about to say. There was a pause and I felt as if I was standing on a hill and looking into a wide plain in front of me. I said, ‘I am not American, you know. I would like to have a coffee without sugar and a little milk only. ‘Of course, sir,’ replied the waiter. A man next to me put his newspaper aside and began a conversation. He wanted to know where I came from and whether I liked the United States. A glass of dark, unsweetened coffee was standing in front of me.” _{Fritz Morgenthaler 1984: in: ders et al. (ed.) Gespräche am sterbenden Fluss, p. 9-10 (my translation).}

“Among the most serious harms that [one] should seek to avoid are harm to dignity, and to bodily and material well-being of people, especially when research is conducted among vulnerable populations. When it conflicts with other responsibilities, this primary obligation can supersede the goal of seeking new knowledge and can lead to decisions to not undertake or to discontinue a project. Determining harms […] must be sustained throughout the course of any project.“_{(AAA 2012)}

Individual Exercise
• Take your own or a hypothetical field project:
• Hypothesize one worst-case scenario which could happen through your presence/research steps in the field. How might you deal with them?
• Then develop less dramatic and more realistic scenarios. How might you deal with them?
• It might help to place yourself in various roles in the social setting, playing the role of the participant (a child, mother of 4 kids, minority member, homeless person) and not just the researcher. _{(PECRS 2018)}

• The concept of vulnerability, since its introduction in a bioethics report in 1979, is given highest priority in national and international ethics policies, guidelines and review boards for medical and social sciences _{(for an overview see. Bracken-Roche et al. 2017)}
• Vulnerability (as a subject’s lack of ability to protect their own interests) presents itself in different ways: cognitive and communicative (e.g. because participants are children, or illiterate); institutional(e.g. because participants as employees/prisoners might be called on/forced to join); structural (belonging to a particular social or cultural group/ minority); personal (by a felt obligation; e.g. through patron/client wife/husband relationship).

• It may also derive from limited access to social goods, such as rights, opportunities, and power (lacking agency, autonomy) _{(For a detailed list of vulnerability areas see. Univ. of Virginia. n.d.}
• The key question for any ethical review is: “Are these subjects made any more vulnerable than they might ordinarily be in their daily lives as a result of their participation in this research?“ _{(Iphofen2013:49)}
• The key problem is: who defines who is vulnerable and based on what premises?

• “For example, in the US, pregnant women are deemed a ‘vulnerable population,’ whose participation in research must be carefully monitored.” [eg. NBAC 2001 , my comment, ms]
• “In the Netherlands, where most pregnancies are handled by midwives and not doctors, there is broad encouragement to not overmedicalizepregnancy, and the inherent vulnerability of pregnant women is not presumed.
• Categorizing pregnant women as ‘vulnerable’ when not backing this with mandated federal maternity leave might, from the vantage of the Netherlands, be seen as unethical rather than protective.” (Göttke et al. 2013.)

• Virokannas et al. in an overview propose to focus on vulnerable life situations, instead of vulnerable groups or individuals and “…to recognise the temporal, situational, relational, and structural nature of vulnerability.”_{(Virokannas et al. 2018:336)}

Point to ponder:
• What if interlocutors categorized as ‘vulnerable’ refuse to be ‘protected’?
• Would they not be made be vulnerable again by exclusion?

Fujii, referring to a study by Ivy Goduka on black child development under apartheid in South Africa, suggests:

• “How does a researcher secure informed consent when more than half of the subjects in her study are illiterate and not familiar with research enterprises? Such people may think that refusing to participate would create problemsfor them and their children. […]
• On the other hand, agreeing to participate may reflect their submission to the school, or to the researcher, who represent authorityin the eyes of black families […]
• People may consent not only because of social pressure, but also because they believe that establishing a relationship with the researcher will be beneficial in and of itself. […]
• In extremely poor, marginalized, or illiterate communities, people may view the researcher as a valuable patron—someone who can provide tangible benefits, such as financial aid, legal assistance, and job referrals.” _{[Fujii 2012:719; based on Goduka 1990] -> for the last two bullet points see also the respective charts under “Negotiation”}

Extra Tip:
What an FPIC process could look like working with indigenous communities can be followed up in an informative and practical paper of the Árran Lule Sami Centre on FPIC-key elements, challenges and recommendations handling resource extraction in the Arctic (Wilson 2016)

• “Asking people about their lives and taking note of personal details often raises expectations about the provision of aid. Indeed, many people equate interviews with needs assessment and subsequent aid provision.
• Getting a written informed consent, i.e. asking for signatures, makes interviews more formal and feeds this impression further…:  ‘If there is an interview, or if you have heard a lot of bullets at night, you know that aid is coming’ [..] If you expect to receive aid, it is better to present yourself as even more vulnerable as you actually are. [..]
• Getting a signature [..]is mostly a way of rendering upward transparency, but is not helpful in practice, sometimes even unhelpful and not necessarily increasing transparency towards our respondents.
• As a team, we are committed to make use of the forms, keeping in mind that we have to do our best to find a balance between upward accountability, downward transparency, and research interests in an optimal way. The coming months will show us how best to strike this balance!” _{(Carolien Jacobs 2020 on the dilemmas of upward accountability and downward transparency getting fpic during fieldwork  within the framework of a major EU research project in the Democratic Republic of  the Congo).}

With regard to confidentiality and anonymity the ethical guidelines for good research practice of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth (ASA) in 2011 state:

“Informants and other research participants should have the right to remain anonymous and to have their rights to privacy and confidentiality respected.
However, privacy and confidentiality present ethnographers, working across cultures, with particularly difficult problems, given the cultural and legal variations between societies.
Also there are various grades in which the research role of the ethnographer may be realized by some or all of participants or may even become ‘invisible’ over time.” _{(ASA. 2011 Ethical Guidelines for Good Research Practice)}

“If guarantees of privacy and confidentiality are made, they must be honored – unless there are clear and overriding ethical reasons not to do so.” _{(ASA 2011. Ethical Guidelines for Good Research Practice)}

Points to ponder:
• What could be “overriding ethical reasons” not to honor guaranteed confidentiality?
• Do you know cases in which anonymization failed?
• Can you think of situations in which the general right to privacy collides with (scientific) public’s interest in information? (powerholders / public persons)?
• What if some participants want to be credited with their full names in publications, but others don’t?

The American Anthropological Association in their 2012 Ethics Guidelines state:

[Researchers] “..should be clear and open regarding the purpose, methods, outcomes, and sponsors of their work.”
They must “..be prepared to acknowledge and disclose to participants and collaborators all tangibleand intangible interests that have, or may reasonably be perceived to have, an impact on their work.”
Researchers “… who otherwise engage in clandestine or secretive research that manipulates or deceives research participants about the sponsorship, purpose, goals or implications of the research, do not satisfy ethical requirements for openness, honesty, transparency and fully informed consent.” (AAA 2012)

The EC recommends:

“[…] provide strong justification for the choice of method by showing the importance of the research objective and demonstrating that your research cannot be conducted in any other way; describe how you will debrief your participants and retrospectively obtain their informed consent; show that the use of deception will not harm your participants socially, emotionally or psychologically and that revealing the real nature of the research will not lead to any discomfort, anger or objections on their part, and finally; obtain local ethics committee approval for your study before it gets under way.” _{(EC 2018a:Ethics in Social Science and Humanities, p.6)}

In their Ethical Guidelines of 2001 the german Working Group on Development Anthropology (AGEE) points out:

“It is no problem to mention the name of a silversmith and his village in a research report about kinds of silver jewelry.
If one deals with the relationship between a community and a nation as a whole, it might be necessary to maintain anonymity of whole towns –if not to change the geographical locations (e.g. Syria, Morocco, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran, etc).
A town of 2,350 inhabitants and 20% Christians as well as 10% Druses will be identified by the national secret intelligence agency within 10 minutes. If one adds a quotation by a sixty-year-old village sheikh who criticizes the government, the expert is likely to cause this person to be imprisoned very quickly.“
Possibly, one could conceal important, though compromising statements by representatives of target groups as general scientific results.” _{(AGEE 2001)}

Do we as social scientists have a legal right to refuse testimony?

• Legal psychologist Mark Stemmler and his team did research on Islamist radicalization in prisons in Germany in 2019. They interviewed prisoners and talked about their childhood, family, faith, the Koran, and politics -but not about crimes.
• For the recording of the conversations, the researchers assured the prisoners of confidentiality and secured the files in an encrypted and anonymized form. One of the suspects was believed by police investigators to be an alleged Islamist. Under threat of prosecution they confiscated a USB-stick recording of the interview with the scientists.
• In the meantime, the General Prosecutor’s Office has discontinued the investigations due to lack of proof. For Stemmler, however, the issue is not off the table. “I can only conduct the interviews if I assure the interviewees of discretion. One builds a trust. [..] If word of this gets out, I won’t have to go to prison anymore.” (DHV 2020)
• His lawyer filed a constitutional complaint in September 2020. _{[see: DHV.2020. Ermittler beschlagnahmen Forschungsdaten. Forschung& Lehre. cf.}

• “Goffman says she witnessed this interaction with her own eyes and was told in interviews with unnamed Philadelphia police officers that looking on hospital sign-in sheets for wanted criminals was a standard departmental procedure.
• Lubet doesn’t buy it, having spoken to a source in the Philadelphia Police Department who called Goffman’s account ‘outlandish’ and denied that any local hospital would have ever shared its sign-in sheet with the police.
• Goffman’s response is simple: I was there. Lubet’s is simpler still: Why should we believe you? [..]
• “As Lubet points out, she so disguised the people and locations that appear in ‘On the Run’ as to make her accounts effectively unverifiable. [..]
• What’s more, Goffman revealed in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer that she shredded all of her notebooks and disposed of the hard drive that contained all of her files out of fear that she could be subpoenaed and thereby forced to incriminate her subjects.”
_{(Neyfakh2015, in “The Ethics of Ethnography; Online Article)}

The self-deceiving digital ethnographer _{(according to de Seta 2018)}

• The networked field-weaver: through everyday tracing of different actors, in various ‘media scapes’, the digital ethnographer weaves(or stitches) her ‘field’ together into a coherent networked (artificial) whole.
• The eager participant-lurker: “…a professionally naive explorer of local online contexts, master of all modes of participation, surveying digital media use from a vantage point of carefully crafted presence.”
• The expert fabricator: “…the accounts produced by digital ethnographers end up including an extremely narrow selection of inscriptions; […] the figure of the expert fabricator …easily overrides the messy, processual and thickly social construction of local expertise.” _{(de Seta 2018)}

Anne Beaulieu, in a note on her laboratory study, states that as a researcher in mediated /digital settings one may have no choice whether to anonymize or not:

• “Years after completing fieldwork at one of the labs that I had always been careful to anonymize in presentations and papers, Google would find traces of my presence as a user registered to the lab’s computer system.
• Furthermore, the ethnographer is not the only one who makes connections or cares about them: participants increasingly demand full citation or else make explicit the identity of the researcher in their own writing.
• A less positive side of establishing co-presence in this way is that it regularly creates friction with some editors and reviewers who feel that the moral valence of anonymizing is such that no circumstances warrant its suspension.”
(Beaulieu 2010: 465)