Ethical problems of interpretation in educational research

Margaret D. LeCompte

pp. 39-66

in: Paul Smeyers, David Bridges, Nicholas C. Burbules, Morwenna Griffiths (eds), International handbook of interpretation in educational research, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstrakt

Ethics address questions of the "good" and how benefits and disadvantages accrued in society are earned and distributed. Research ethics, then, concern how the "good" translates into research practice. The chapter addresses ethics in the conduct of research and what will happen to participants, and ethics in interpretation, or what happens to data after they are collected, how and what kind of interpretations researchers assign to research results, and what consequences those interpretations have for human beings. Ethical concerns are divided into procedural or formal matters and everyday or ordinary (Lambek 2010) matters, and the differences among them are discussed. Also discussed are whether epistemological differences mandate different approaches to ethics, what interpretation really means and how it has ethical valence, and what standard concerns about ethics mean in the twenty-first century, as they are redefined for research in non-Western cultural settings and on groups, rather than individuals.