Introduction

Even if one does not teach interpretive methods in particular, all those who teach methods can learn something from these four symposium contributions as the essays provide grist for reflection on pedagogical strategies and goals

Encountering your IRB 2.0 : What political scientists need to know

This essay corrects and updates one that was originally published in Qualitative & Multi-Method Research and, in a condensed version, in three other APSA Organized Section newsletters. Our research into IRB policy has shown that many political scientists are not familiar with some of its key provisions. The intent of the essay is to increase awareness of the existing policy's impact on political scientific research and, in particular, on graduate students and junior faculty. We remain concerned that at present, faculty are leaving discussions of research ethics to IRBs (and their counterparts worldwide), whereas these Boards largely focus on complying with the regulatory details of governmental policy. Even though this essay seeks to clarify the latter, we remain convinced that research ethics ought to be vigorously taken up within disciplinary and departmental conversations

Framing “deception” and “covertness” in research : Do milgram, humphreys, and zimbardo justify regulating social science research ethics?

No systematic assessment exists that justifies the extension of ethics regulations to non-experimental social science research. Instead, three studies—by MILGRAM, HUMPHREYS, and ZIMBARDO—are repeatedly cited to support such regulation, based on their use of deception and/or covertness. Challenging such regulation requires these studies' detailed re-examination. In this article we offer a critique of deception and covert research as understood solely within the context of experimentation: that framing of those research activities has narrowed their consideration in ways that do a disservice to social science research (as comparison with studies by ROSENHAN and LEO further clarifies). We show that, controversial as they may have been, these projects met a key ethics principle: "beneficence," something ignored by most of the critics assessing their work. Theorizing deception and covertness, we establish distinctions between them and argue for the importance of their use in studies of powerful individuals and organizations, as current political climates make evident.</p

Reading our readers

Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes is less a “how-to” book than a “how to think about such matters” book, to paraphrase Atkinson (1992: 8), as these five comment authors have understood. Although we initially thought we would be writing a “how-to” book, the material talked back (cf. Schön 1987), refusing to go in that direction, moving us more and more toward the manuscript now in print. We did not want to write a manifesto in tone—a matter both Tanya Schwarz and Christian Bueger raise—because of our desire to reach across epistemic communities and to speak in an educating spirit (described further below). Nor did we want to write a history of interpretive research contributions or attempt a catalogue of particular thinkers—points made by Corinne Heaven and Bueger—as both have been done elsewhere and were inconsistent with our purpose of focusing on issues arising in designing research. Moreover, that purpose was precisely to intervene in contemporary methods discourses: The language of research design has become so ossified, so closed, that an interpretive logic of inquiry cannot fit within its confines. Moreover, as Katherine Cramer Walsh and Bernhard Kittel have understood, we wrote not in the spirit of engaging “methods wars,” but rather more in a “Can’t we all just get along?” vein, asking in a more intentionally educational spirit what researchers of all stripes need to know in order to talk with, rather than past, one another