Harms, Benefits, Wrongs, and Rights in Fieldwork

Abstract

The term ``research with human subjects'' is frequently used to describe a wide variety of biomedical, behavioral, and social investigations. Unfortunately, the phrase obscures significant differences between methods. Investigators who carry out fieldwork, or participant observation, traditionally call the people they study ``informants,'' as opposed to the ``respondents'' of survey research, or the ``subjects'' of psychological (and biomedical) experimentation. These terms describe radically different relationships between those who study, and those who are studied (Spradley, 1979, chap. 3). The various modes of research also differ in the narrowness or breadth of research focus, in the incidence and seriousness of harms and benefits and, consequently, in the ethical problems associated with each method. As a result, procedures designed to improve the ethical adequacy of one kind of research (such as signed consent forms, or randomized response methods) may have little effect on the practices of another.1