Ethics of Qualitative Research

In simplest terms qualitative researchers attempt to understand people's lived experiences, patterns of discourse, and observable behaviors as they occur in natural settings. Such inquiry rarely results in numerical tallies, instead generating textual descriptions of unstructured data that are thought to represent phenomena of interest. These qualitative research data are analyzed in terms of data-generated themes that point to one or more interpretations of the findings. As a cyclical and iterative process, qualitative research does not proceed in a linear fashion, and this flexibility can make it hard to predict what will come up in terms of ethical issues as the research progresses. It may also be relatively intrusive because it often delves into the private realm and it is inherently interested in people's personal views. As a result of these and other factors, “qualitative inquiry raises distinctive ethical issues” that should be understood on their own, not just in comparison to quantitative research. Keywords: Ethics; Research Methods in Applied Linguistics; 2000 - present