Ethical Validation: Reframing Research Ethics in Engineering Education Research To Improve Research Quality

Abstract

Background: Prior to undertaking studies involving human subjects, engineering education researchers are required to consider the ethical implications of their work by obtaining approval from an ethical review board. Purpose/Hypothesis: Recent research suggests that some unintended consequences of this procedure are that it externalizes and inflexibly formalizes ethical considerations, and limits researchers’ readiness to systematically identify and consider ethical questions that arise while conducting research. Design/Method: We used a collaborative inquiry approach to examine such ethically important moments that emerged in two of our interpretive research projects. We drew on Walther, Sochacka, and Kellam's framework for interpretive research quality as the departure point for our shared sense-making process. Results: Our explorations revealed two insights that connect research ethics to research quality in novel ways. First, we found that the quality of our work improved when we critically explored the intersections between our motivations and intentions for investigating particular research topics and broader cultural agendas and assumptions. Second, we found that when we actively sought to do justice to the participants, co-investigators, and readers of our research, we were afforded with opportunities to increase the quality of our work, in sometimes quite unexpected ways. Conclusions: We synthesized the findings from our collaborative inquiry into a process-oriented model for ethical validation, which we propose as a sixth construct to our prior five-construct framework for interpretive research quality.