Situation
Professor Esser has decided to change her research focus slightly. She wants to study the same substantive issues she has for several years, but in a new population: new immigrants to the U.S. who should constitute a natural test of some of the theories she has been developing on immigrant communities. She decides that she will study Ethiopian women who are coming to live in her state in comparatively large numbers without their husbands. She spends her sabbatical at a research institution in another state learning Amharic and spends the next two years honing her language skills. The Ethiopian women are very suspicious of her and she has an extremely difficult time gaining their trust. She goes to extraordinary lengths to assure them of her good intentions over a period of almost a year before she feels confident that she is in a position to get reliable data. She moves her family to an apartment in the Ethiopian neighborhood and, an ethnographer by training, she spends the next three years as immersed in the community of Ethiopian women as she can be. Her field notes are voluminous, partly in English and partly in Amharic, and mostly written in her own hand. The first book she writes using these data is seen as path-breaking. Several months after it appears, she receives a request from another researcher who asks that she share her field notes with him. He agrees to pay for whatever costs are involved in reproducing those data and shipping them. Professor Esser feels that the data are as much a part of her and her family as their own skin and is appalled that another researcher should expect that she will share them with him, particularly because he will not have the context–three years of family living among Ethiopian immigrant families–with which to make sense of them. She is also concerned that her field notes will be misinterpreted or mistranslated and that her subjects’ lives will be misrepresented.
Questions
- How should Professor Esser proceed in making a decision about whether or not to comply with the request?
- Has Professor Esser any obligation to the Ethiopian women she studied?
Discussion
Data-sharing is not common among ethnographers because of the belief in the importance of context in making sense of data and the recognition of the impossibility of capturing every aspect of context in field notes. In addition, it is rarely sought because of the difficulties of transforming it into a usable form. Nonetheless, as part of a scientific community ethnographers need to develop strategies to make their research as available for the scrutiny of that community as possible. Strategies for gathering and storing data that will facilitate data-sharing need to be considered before the research is undertaken. For example, use of qualitative analysis software would ensure easy transmission between researchers as well as relatively speedy verification of arrays of coding strategies. Some ethnographers would argue that all such programs violate the assumptions that underlie qualitative/inductive research, however, and for that reason prefer to use their own physical, intellectual and emotional selves to engage in that process. They would argue that the integrity of the research is a more important goal than those of science and that they should not be forced to compromise the former is order to satisfy the requirements of the latter. The major issues for data-sharing in this case, however, revolve around informed consent and the protection of human subjects. At the very least, Professor Esser should have developed a strategy for keeping her subjects anonymous in her field notes. At this point she should consider whether there are measures she can take or agreements she can make with the scholar requesting her data that will minimize any threats to her research population and facilitate that scholar’s understanding of the context within which the research was done.
If, in obtaining their informed consent, Professor Esser did not make her subjects aware that she had an obligation to provide access to her field notes to other researchers, their consent needs to be obtained before she shares her data. It could be argued that the onus of obtaining that consent falls on the shoulders of the researcher making the request, however. If Professor Esser has guaranteed them confidentiality rather than simply anonymity, this is impossible because she cannot share their identities with the other researcher. There are situations in which guarantees of confidentiality are a sine qua non of doing the research. If neither confidentiality nor anonymity were guaranteed, but if any participant in the study now denies consent, Professor Esser needs to decide what this denial permits her to withhold: data relating to a single individual or data relating to an entire family, clan or community. Moreover, if revealing up front that she had an obligation to make her field notes available to other researchers should they request it would have made it impossible to obtain the consent for the current study and thus impossible to do the study, Professor Esser needs to make it clear to the researcher making the request that this was the case and deny him access to her field notes. Finally, if she has not analyzed the data in her field notes for other planned books or articles, she may also want to explain that to the researcher who has made the request and withhold all or part of the data until the analysis is complete and ready for publication. She should discuss this delay with the other researcher and agree on a time by which he can expect access.
