Ethical Concerns of Turning Research into Data

As an ethnographer, one major concern of turning research into data is having the consent of the participants. In his reading, Boellstorff talks about a number of experiments that were carried out without informed consent. One study he talked about was the Tuskegee experiments, which resulted in a law suit being filed against the U.S. Public Health Service. This study followed 399 low-income African American men with syphilis to discover how the disease spread and affected the body, however, they were denied the standard cure for the disease in order for researchers to continue data collection. This is an example of a major ethical concern that was violated to record data, and it also violated the Nuremberg Code, which states “‘voluntary consent’ is ‘absolutely essential’ in biomedical research, and that experimentation should yield results “for the good of society”.

Not only has breaching this major ethical concern resulted in serious humanitarian crimes, but it is also an obligation upon the ethnographer to be transparent with their participants. For example, Boellstorff states, “it is important to emphasize that as ethnographers we are obligated to do as much as possible to reveal to our informants the nature and purpose of our studies. Providing information regarding aims and methods is necessary to establish and sustain good relations. It is up to the ethnographer to explain the research to informants, and, at the inception of a study, to clearly identify oneself as an ethnographer.”

Another ethical concern in translating research into data is anonymity. This is a key aspect because ethnographers have to protect the identities of people while conducting fieldwork. By providing protection for the people involved in an ethnography, an ethnographer can avoid negative outcomes. For example, in the ethnography I am conducting for my project, Muslim online dating is considered taboo. However, I am also interviewing several Muslims to gather research and participant observation. Since the concept of Muslim dating is taboo within Muslim societies, if I am not careful in protecting my participants identities, it can lead to negative outcomes for their personal lives.