Martin Tolich

University of Otago · Department of Sociology, Gender and Social Work

Purpose - This paper demonstrates the limited efficacy procedural ethics has for qualitative research. Ethics committee’s instructions have a short shelf life given the research question qualitative researchers create is volatile; that is, likely to change due to the inductive, emergent, informant-led nature of qualitative research. Design - This a...

Informed consent and confidentiality are the two mainstays of qualitative research ethics, yet they have a propensity to disintegrate in an emergent, iterative research design. This chapter examines how to approach this uncharted territory by having researchers take full responsibility for ethical considerations by using more robust forms of consen...

The pedagogy of teaching research methods, let alone research ethics, is an under-researched field. In this article a sociology lecturer connects five postgraduate students in a qualitative research ethics course with two novice ethnographers’ candid empirical studies. While it is common for students to read articles and books on the topic, what wa...

Existe uma tendência preocupante nas ciências sociais através do qual os pesquisadores ignoram a revisão ética. Autoetinógrafos muitas vezes se isentam dos Comitês de Revisão institucional (CRI) alegando que as histórias que contam são de sua própria autoria; Mesmo quando outros escreveram em suas histórias podem não consentir. Uma situação semelha...

A previous research ethics article by the authors provided evidence to support the claim that the New Zealand Ethics Committee (NZEC) was a powerless ethics committee. Ethics review applicants were not formally obliged to seek ethics review, and any committee recommendations were given on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis. One year later, the capacity...

This study examines a significant gap in the role of providing ethical guidance and support for community-based research. University and health-based ethical review committees in New Zealand predominantly serve as ‘gatekeepers’ that consider the ethical implications of a research design in order to protect participants and the institution from harm...

A sociology minor appeared at Otago University in 2003 and a major in 2005, but these relatively late developments were preceded by a rich history of sociology like research and teaching at our institution. This article presents a sociological prehistory which winds its way through aspects of the teaching and research of home science, preventive me...

This presentation tells a story of the genesis and growth of an independent ethics committee in Aotearoa New Zealand that is independently governed outside of the Ministry of Health and tertiary education institutional committees and founded by four previous Health & Disability Ethics Committee (HDEC) chairs. NZEC responds to a growing awareness th...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on care workers employed in clients’ own homes recognising the skills and responsibilities of home-based care workers. Design/methodology/approach – Interviews and focus groups with domiciliary care workers in New Zealand centred on what these employees actually do during their working day. Findings...

The first objective of this article is to demonstrate that ethics committee members can learn a great deal from a forensic analysis of two classic psychology studies: Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Study and Milgram’s Obedience Study. Rather than using hindsight to retrospectively eradicate the harm in these studies, the article uses a prospective mini...

The Ethics Application Repository is an open access, online repository of exemplary Institutional Review Board (ethics committee) application forms donated by scholars who want to gift some of their expertise and wisdom to novice researchers in the spirit of a public good. This article describes the background for the genesis of the project, the bu...

Any research is potentially compromised when researchers address ethical issues retrospectively rather than by anticipating these issues. In this regard, creative analytical practices (CAP) autoethnography has endemic problems. In Part 1 of this article, I detail a case study of an autoethnography in which journal reviewers insisted that an author...

Objectives: To understand the motivations of university students volunteering for clinical trials in New Zealand and their comprehension of risk. Methods: An ethnography using both direct observation and unstructured interviews of student volunteers in two New Zealand clinical trial companies.Subjects: Eighteen volunteers who participated in one of...

Qualitative research, especially visual ethnography, is an iterative not a linear process, replete with good intentions, false starts, mistaken assumptions, miscommunication and a continually revised statement of the problem. That the camera freezes everything and everyone in the frame only complicates ethical considerations. This work, jointly aut...

Informed consent and confidentiality supposedly minimize harm for research participants in all qualitative research methodologies, inclusive of one-on-one unstructured interviews and focus groups. This is not the case for the latter. Confidentiality and informed consent uniquely manifest themselves as endemic ethical dilemmas for focus group resear...

USA dominance of international clinical trials mandates complex and lengthy participant information sheets and limits the amount of scrutiny New Zealand ethics committees can have over information sheets form or content. This paper provides an alternative exemplar: a summary of a lengthy participant information sheet written in less than one page,...

Low-level community based ethics committees staffed by teachers, parents and community representatives can readily review children’s science fair projects subject to the revision of two core assumptions currently governing children’s Science Fairs. The first part of the paper recasts the New Zealand Royal Society guidelines from its primary emphasi...

WHERE DID THE ETHICS REVIEW PROCESS go wrong for qualitative research, and how can we make it right, or at least better? This paper begins with an excerpt from an ethnography of attempting to attend an ethics review-related workshop, which exemplifies that the ethics-review process is based on epistemological assumptions aligned with positivistic r...

The authors, members of two different regional health ethics committees, write about their observations evaluating ethics application where researchers' conflicts of interest go unacknowledged either when researching their own patients or when the research subjects experience a temporary vulnerability--i.e. they have learned they are to lose a body...

Despite recommendations from the Cartwright Report ethical review by health ethics committees has continued in New Zealand without health practitioners ever having to acknowledge their dual roles as health practitioners researching their own patients. On the other hand, universities explicitly identify doctor/research-patient relations as potential...

This research note explores a limit in the principle of confidentiality, demonstrating how informants' connected relationships can lead to impaired or diminished autonomy. Insiders may recognize what other insiders have said to a researcher in a private interview. Internal confidentiality is distinct from external confidentiality, which assures pro...

This paper describes a research project in which some of the dynamics of informal gendered task segregation between male and female workers in American supermarkets with the same job description are explored. It also provides a discussion of the implications of this form of gender inequality for equal opportunities policies.

The emergence and dominance of the Mäori-centred research paradigm is leaving Päkehä researchers out in the cold. "Päkehä paralysis" draws on my experiences as author, teacher and university ethics committee member to account for the reasons why so many Päkehä postgraduate students are caught in a state of paralysis, deliberately excluding Mäori fr...

One of the greatest difficulties Japanese multinationals have had is managing American managers in their US subsidiaries. The reason for this is fundamental and profound: Americans and Japanese conceive of management very differently and have strikingly different conceptions of themselves as managers and of correct management practice. We do two th...

Since 1977 New Zealand female jockeys have negotiated their turf, overcoming great resistance from trainers, male jockeys and the racing clubs to attain success in major races and premierships. Fifty percent of New Zealand's apprentice jockeys are now female. This success may be explained by the fact that female jockeys' bodies and gender socialisa...

Goffman disclosed how the transformative capacity of a total institution could be usurped by social forces internal to the institution. This study of apprentice jockey training produces similar results, yet in this study the forces undermining the total institution are external to this total institution. The paper is in three parts: first, it docum...

Hochschild's 1980s study of flight attendants found them estranged from their emotions. Using evidence drawn from interviews and observations of supermarket clerks' performance of customer service, this study replaces Hochschild's concept of emotional labor with new definitions of emotion as work-autonomous emotion management and regulated emotion...