|
|
 |
Listserv Message Center
 |
Special Issue: Ethical Issues in Qualitative Research |
 |
|
|
|
| Posted by: | Siobhan Healy-Cullen |
| Title/Position: | Postdoctoral Research Fellow |
| School/Organization: | Massey University |
| Sent to listserv of: | SESP, SPSSI |
| Date posted: | March 31st, 2025 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
Call for Articles: Special Issue in Methods in Psychology
Special Issue Title: Ethical Issues in Qualitative Research
https://www.sciencedirect.com/special-issue/315575/ethical-issues-in-qualitative-research
Special Issue Editors
Siobhán Healy-Cullen (s.healy-cullen@massey.ac.nz)
Kerry Chamberlain (K.Chamberlain@massey.ac.nz)
Deadline for manuscript submission: 31 July, 2025
NOTE: Methods in Psychology is an Open Access publication, but article processing charges will be waived for all articles accepted for this special issue.
Further, we welcome articles from any discipline, not just psychology, that have implications for ethical issues and practice for qualitative research.
“Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.” (John Berger, art critic, novelist, painter and poet).
Introduction
Collecting qualitative research data often gives us deep insight into people’s lives and experiences, and delivers information that can be intensely personal. However, this depth of understanding also brings ethical challenges that must be carefully navigated. Qualitative data might be in the form of stories about others that could reveal their identity, photographs of identifiable people, or material objects that could reveal identities. Conducting qualitative research typically brings researchers into close contact with participants, raising important issues about how to manage such relationships, perhaps more so when we work with couples, families, or other inter-related groups. From issues of safety, privacy and confidentiality to the dynamics of researcher-participant relationships, ethical considerations are pivotal in ensuring the integrity of qualitative research practices.
Scope of the Special Issue
This Special Issue calls on researchers to critically engage with the ethical complexities of qualitative inquiry, where immersion in participants’ lives demands constant vigilance to safeguard their privacy and safety. For the special issue, we are especially interested in articles that deliver new thinking, new research, new understandings, or even challenging or provocative arguments concerning ethical matters. We invite contributions that offer new insights through critical reflections, empirical research, or theoretical advancements related to ethical practices in qualitative inquiry.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
Ethical challenges in specific methodologies: Autoethnography, participant observation, case studies, and innovative methods like go-along interviews, photo- or object-elicitation interviews, or any methods that create identifiable data.
Ethical considerations in online research: Addressing the specific challenges of working with participants in digital contexts, including confidentiality and privacy in online platforms that may not be fully secure, participant care and safety.
Ethical issues in the use of data: Including member-checking, data-sharing, archiving, and dissemination, or uses such as generating creative works (e.g., theatre, poetry) derived from participant data.
Ethical dilemmas in data creation: Privacy protection, anonymisation, harm minimisation, and managing relational and power dynamics within research contexts.
Reflexivity and its role in ethical practice: Understanding how researchers' positionalities and the epistemological underpinnings of qualitative research come to bear on ethical research processes and the ethical use of data.
Balancing procedural and practical ethics: Exploring experiences with ethics committees (university and other institutions), and the tension between formal ethical review procedures and the evolving, often unpredictable ethical dilemmas that arise in the field.
Covert research: Ethical considerations surrounding the use of covert methodologies, including whether covert research can ever be justified, and the implications for informed consent.
Insider-outsider quandaries: Particularly when working with vulnerable groups, or variously minoritised communities.
Working with indigenous communities: Creating data with indigenous groups in a culturally safe way, managing data in a way that considers issues of data sovereignty, and sharing of knowledge and materials in a collaborative manner.
The ethics of using online and pre-existing data: How to ethically work with data that has not been collected directly with people (vis-à-vis interviews, for example), such as social media content, archives, forums, or existing online documents not originally created for research purposes.
Benefits and implications of ethical standards: Exploring how adherence to ethical principles enhances qualitative research practice.
Submission Guidelines
Articles may be in any format accepted by the journal – Research Articles (around 9,000 words) including theoretical commentaries and case studies, Review Articles (around 9,000 words), or Critical Commentaries (around 2,500 words).
Please read through the Aims and Scope for the journal and the Guide for Authors before preparing your submission. Manuscripts should be prepared according to the journal's guidelines and will undergo anonymised peer review (read more about the peer review process for Methods in Psychology here). Authors should submit their manuscripts through the journal's online submission portal, indicating that the paper is intended for the Special Issue on Ethical Issues in Qualitative Research.
Note that contributors may be asked to act as reviewers for other submissions to the Special Issue.
Please feel free to contact the editors of this Special Issue to discuss possibilities for articles in advance of submission:
Siobhán Healy-Cullen (s.healy-cullen@massey.ac.nz)
Kerry Chamberlain (K.Chamberlain@massey.ac.nz)
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Forum Home Page
