Grounded theory is a qualitative research approach that uses inductive analysis as a principal technique. Yet, researchers who embrace this approach often use sensitizing concepts to guide their analysis. In this article, the author examines the relationship between sensitizing concepts and grounded theory. Furthermore, he illustrates the application of sensitizing concepts in a study of community-based antipoverty projects in Jamaica. The article contains commentary about trustworthiness techniques, the coding process, and the constant comparative method of analysis, as well as a synopsis of study findings.

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Grounded Theory and Sensitizing Concepts

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Invisible colleges : diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities

In 1954 Leon Festinger, a brilliant young experimental social psychologist in the process of inventing a new theory of human behavior - the theory of cognitive dissonance - and two of his colleagues, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter, infiltrated a cult who believed the end of the world was only months away. How would these people feel when their prophecy remained unfulfilled? Would they admit the error of their prediction, or would they, as Festinger predicted, readjust their reality to make sense of the new circumstances? Not only is When Prophecy Fails of great historical importance as the first test of a powerful theory, but it is also a surprisingly touching account of what happens to ordinary people under extraordinary circumstances.

When Prophecy Fails.

This article presents an analysis of the Canadian ethics review process by a member of a Research Ethics Board. The author suggests that the new formal system for regulating the ethical conduct of scholarly research is experiencing a form of “ethics creep.” This is characterized by a dual process whereby the regulatory system is expanding outward to incorporate a host of new activities and institutions, while at the same time intensifying the regulation of activities deemed to fall within its ambit. These tendencies are demonstrated through an analysis of: 1) the scope of research ethics protocols, 2) the concept of “harm” employed by these boards, 3) the use of informed consent provisions, and 4) the presumption that research participants will remain anonymous. To accentuate the nature of this ethics creep, comparisons are made between the ways in which identical knowledge generation activities are governed within journalism and the academy. The conclusion suggests that one effect of the increasingly formalized research ethics structure is to rupture the relationship between following the rules and acting ethically. Some of the reasons for this “creep” are highlighted along with the risks that it poses for scholarship.

Ethics Creep: Governing Social Science Research in the Name of Ethics

Management academics have tended to rely on ethics codes developed by social researchers in related fields to inform their research practice. The point of this paper is to question whether this remains a viable approach in the current climate that is characterized by a significant increase in ethical regulation across the social sciences. We suggest that management researchers face ethical issues of a different nature to those most frequently confronted by other social science researchers, and argue for more explicit acknowledgement of contextual factors involved in management research. An exploratory analysis of the content of ethics codes formulated by nine social scientific associations is undertaken to identify the main ethical principles they cover and to analyse their underlying ethical tone. Drawing attention to the principle of reciprocity, which is found in very few codes, we suggest that an ethics code could be used to formulate new ways of thinking about management research relationships. Despite the risk that ethics codes may encourage instrumental compliance with minimal ethical obligations, we suggest they also have the potential to reflect a more aspirational agenda. The development of an ethics code for management research should therefore be seen as a potentially worthwhile project.

The Ethics of Management Research: An Exploratory Content Analysis

Background and history. -- The critics. Sencitizing concepts as anomalies in Blumer's social scientific procedure. Sensitizing concepts as lacking in social structural dimensions. Sensitizing concepts as characterized by vagueness. Sensitizing concepts as nominal definitions. Senzitizing concepts as restricting the range for collecting data. Sensitizing concepts as going stale. -- Taking distance from the data. Folk concepts or terms. Sensitizing concepts. Sensitizing supra-concepts -- Constructing sensitizing concepts. Step 1: Deriving concepts from participants' perspective. Step 2: "Exploring" and using focus groups. Step 3: "Inspecting" and "dimensionalizing". Step 4: Relating to other social contexts. Step 5: Organizing the same family of terms. -- Cross-cultural settings. The Icelandic field setting -- Theoretical and analytical implications. Qualitative and quantitative approaches. Sociological theory. Cognate disciplines.

Working with Sensitizing Concepts: Analytical Field Research

Will C. van den Hoonaard (ed.), Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002, 240 pages.Reviewer: Tom O'NeillBrock UniversityMost of us who research social and cultural life face an institutional ethics review process that many find alien to the ethnographic tradition. Many anthropologists have been stymied by research ethics boards, and those of us who have sat on REBs often feel pressure to justify our methodological ethos in an environment dominated by the quantitative and medical sciences. As well, ethical review of research often seems an exegesis of the Tri-Council Policy Statement on Ethical Conduct rather than a close consideration on the ethical practice of research. There is, quite appropriately, considerable resentment and resistance to institutional ethical review in Canadian universities, and social scientists are coming forward to voice their concerns. Will van den Hoonaard's edited volume, Walking the Tightrope: Ethical Issues for Qualitative Researchers, aptly encompasses the growing dissatisfaction with the Tri-Council policy, and illustrates the how many ethical issues implicit in qualitative methodology were not anticipated by the policy's architects.Walking the Tightrope is a product of the Qualitative Analysis Conferences of 1999 and 2000, and the editor has taken care to arrange the contributions in such an order that they complement and quite often provocatively contradict one another. The shadow of the Tri-Council Policy looms large in most of the chapters, beginning with van den Hoonaard's introduction that broadly sketches the tensions between qualitative research and institutional ethical review. In some of the chapters, the tension becomes unbearable. Some of the authors air specific grievances over unsympathetic treatment by REBs that reveals their own lack of understanding about ethical review while others provide engaging discussions on the theoretical and practical implications of ethical research.In the first chapter, Patrick O'Neill evaluates several recent cases in which participant confidentiality, a corner-stone of the Tri-Council Policy, could not be adequately maintained by researchers because of the legal implications of the data collected. Most infamously was the Ogden case, in which a Simon Fraser University researcher refused to divulge the identity of a participant of a project on assisted suicide to a provincial coroner. In the aftermath of the legal battle (which the researcher won), SFU began to insist that researchers absolutely guarantee confidentiality before ethical approval was granted. Providing such absolute guarantees, based on our ability to accurately predict the effects of the knowledge that we generate, is, however, often impossible. When SFU judged that the potential for legal suspension of participant confidentiality existed, the institutional response was to censor such research. This had enormous consequences for much research in social work and criminology, as well as anthropological investigations in controversial areas. O'Neill, happily, provides a legal remedy for this dilemma, and argues that universities should be compelled to support their own scholars when they are challenged in the courts.A number of the subsequent chapters take aim at the shortcomings of the Tri-Council policy in Canada, and provide a comparative view of the situation in the United States and the United Kingdom. In her chapter, Florence Kellner argues that the Tri-Council Policy as an ethical code does little to promote the particular morality that obligates researchers to protect the welfare of their participants. Patricia and Peter Adler follow with their charge that Institutional Review Boards in the United States are more concerned about liability to the university than the welfare of participants. They describe an "Orwellian atmosphere" in the United States that polices and inhibits research. Melanie Pearce echoes the Adlers with a personal account of how an ethics committee in the United Kingdom insisted on draconian changes to her dissertation research methodology based on the quantitative format preferred by the committee. …

Walking the Tightrope: Ethical Issues for Qualitative Researchers

While anonymity is a widely-held goal in research-ethics review policies, it is a virtually unachievable goal in ethnographic and qualitative research. This paper explores how anonymity is undermined in the data-gathering, analysis, and publication stages in ethnography. It also examines problems associated with maintaining a collective identity. What maintains anonymity, however, are the natural accretions of daily life, the underuse of data, and the remoteness of place and time between the gathering-data stage and the eventual publications of findings.

Is Anonymity an Artifact in Ethnographic Research

Au cours des dix dernieres annees, nous avons ete temoins de l'im-portance croissante accordee aux principes d'ethique appliques a la recherche mais aussi de la popularite et de la pertinence grandis-santes de la recherche inductive, plus connue sous le nom de recherche et d'analyse qualitatives. Dans cet article, nous etudions le contexte social dans lequel se situe l'examen deontologique des travaux de recherche et son influence sur la recherche qualitative. Plus precisement, nous soutenons que, lorsque cet examen deontologique est fonde sur les principes et l'epistemologie de la recherche deductive, il a tendance a rogner et a entraver le dynamisme et l'ob-jet de la recherche qualitative. A l'aide de documents, de rapports de recherche formelle et d'apres notre experience personnelle et celle d'autres collegues, nous demontrons l'aspect disproportione de l'examen deontologique de la recherche, qui semble favoriser la recherche quantitative - c'est-a-dire la recherche formelle fondee sur des hypotheses -, au detriment de la recherche qualitative. Nos exem-ples proviennent surtout du Canada, des Etats-Unis et d'Angleterre, en anthropologie, education, sciences infirmieres, psychologie et so-ciologie. Nous affirmons que les processus sociaux qui sous-tendent l'analyse deontologique de la recherche s'apparentent a ceux que lon associe a une panique morale.



The recent decade saw not only the rise of the importance of formal ethical research guidelines, but also witnessed the growing popularity and relevance of inductive research, better known as qualitative research and analysis. This paper addresses the social context of formal ethical review and its influence on qualitative research. Specifically, it suggests that when ethical review is based on the principles and epistemology of deductive research, it tends to erode or hamper the thrust and purpose of qualitative research. Using documents, formal research accounts, and the experiences of others and myself, the author indicates the lopsided nature of reviewing the ethics of research, which seems to work in favour of quantitative, formal hypotheses-driven research, to the serious disadvantage of qualitative research. The paper draws most heavily on evidence in Canada, the United States, and England, in the fields of anthropology, education, nursing, psychology, and sociology. The social processes underpinning research-ethics review, the author avers, are similar to those associated with a moral panic.

Will C. van den Hoonaard

Papers

Working with Sensitizing Concepts: Analytical Field Research

Walking the Tightrope: Ethical Issues for Qualitative Researchers

Is Anonymity an Artifact in Ethnographic Research

Is Research-Ethics Review a Moral Panic? [*]

Seduction of Ethics: Transforming the Social Sciences