This dissertation research investigates the concept and practices of ethical responsibility in the conduct of research at universities. Recently enacted federal mandates for institutional accountability require individual researchers to demonstrate responsibility in the conduct of research by complying with prescriptive procedures that define ethical practices according to ostensibly objective standards and assume that responsibility is demonstrable. Federal policies and regulations do not address the ways qualitative researchers working in educational settings might respond to more nuanced questions of ethical responsibility. There exists, then, a gap between federal and institutional requirements and the behavior researchers demonstrate as they interpret and apply standards for human subject research within their own work. In this study, I consider consistencies and disparities between researchers’ obligations to comply with federally mandated standards as well as institutional requirements and researchers’ ethical responsibilities to foreground the protection of human subjects in research.
The study is multi-sited and takes a postmodern emergent approach to investigating questions of what is meant by the notion of responsibility in research, how ethical responsibility might be demonstrated by researchers in academic communities, and in what ways institutional review processes affect underlying ethical principles in responsible conduct of research. Standpoint epistemologies inform the construction and interpretations of researchers’ actions, beliefs, and values. The empirical work traces effects of institutional review boards in an ethnographic study carried out for more than two years and across three subject positions.
The study concludes with a case study focusing on a teacher education program that balances ethical principles of justice and autonomy. The case study report is grounded in earlier fieldwork and translates theoretical knowledge into action. The goal of the culminating project is to demonstrate an empirically based model for initiating change in the often troublesome relationships between IRBs and education researchers.