Method, reflexivity, and ethics in research processes with young peopleAbstract
The political-scientific challenges currently facing the social sciences, and more specifically the field of youth studies, highlight the need to redefine the value of the methods in the production of science and the mediation between concept and reality. This is not referent to the regulated and standardized method as understood by more positivist paradigms, but rather to methodological possibilities that are sufficiently flexible, agile, creative, and youthful to deal with the complexities of contemporary youth worlds. More than standardizing the applied method, validating the application of these methodological designs involves the development of reflective monitoring strategies that make the research processes with young people transparent, namely in terms of methodological reflexivity, positional reflexivity, and ethical reflexivity. The latter must go beyond the application of the growing legal and normative regulation, which has entangled the production of science in bureaucratic webs, and place researchers as social beings and their research practice as a relational practice, implying epistemic relations of co-labor with study participants.
Key words:
Method; Youth; Methodological reflexivity; Positional reflexivity; Ethical reflexivity
Resumo
Os desafios político-científicos que atualmente atravessam as ciências sociais e, mais especificamente, a área dos estudos de juventudes, alertam para a necessidade de revalorização do método na produção de ciência e na mediação entre conceito e realidade. Não o método regrado e padronizado tal como é entendido por paradigmas de natureza mais positivista, mas possibilidades metodológicas suficientemente flexíveis, ágeis, criativas e juvenilizadas para lidar com as complexidades dos mundos juvenis contemporâneos. Mais do que a estandardização do método aplicado, a validação da aplicação desses desenhos metodológicos passa pelo desenvolvimento de estratégias reflexivas de acompanhamento que tornem transparente os processos de pesquisa com jovens, nomeadamente em termos de reflexividade metodológica, reflexividade posicional e reflexividade ética. Esta última deve ir além da aplicação da crescente regulamentação jurídica e normativa que tem envolvido a produção de ciência em teias burocráticas, e colocar o pesquisador a si próprio enquanto ser social e a sua prática de pesquisa como prática relacional, implicando relações epistémicas de co-laboração com os participantes dos estudos.
Palavras-chave:
Método; Juventudes; Reflexividade metodológica; Reflexividade posicional; Reflexividade ética
Resumen
Los desafíos político-científicos que enfrentan actualmente las ciencias sociales, y más específicamente, el campo de los estudios de juventud, resaltan la necesidad de revalorizar el método en la producción científica y en la mediación entre concepto y realidad. Este enfoque no es un método regulado y estandarizado como lo entienden los paradigmas más positivistas, sino posibilidades metodológicas lo suficientemente flexibles, ágiles, creativas y juveniles como para abordar las complejidades del mundo juvenil contemporáneo. Más que simplemente estandarizar el método aplicado, validar la aplicación de estos diseños metodológicos requiere el desarrollo de estrategias de seguimiento reflexivo que transparenten los procesos de investigación con jóvenes, particularmente en términos de reflexividad metodológica, reflexividad posicional y reflexividad ética. Esta última debe ir más allá de la aplicación de las crecientes regulaciones legales y normativas que han envuelto la producción científica en redes burocráticas, y posicionar al investigador como un ser social y su práctica de investigación como una práctica relacional, lo que implica relaciones epistémicas de colaboración con los participantes del estudio.
Palabras clave:
Método; Juventud; Reflexividad metodológica; Reflexividad posicional; Reflexividad ética
Introduction
The categories of “youth” and “young people” have long persisted in social and political life, full of stereotypical images that, as demonstrated by Ferreira1, consider them as subjects of resistance and social change versus apathetic subjects uninterested in politics and social participation; subjects of innovation and emancipation versus subjects who are victims of vulnerability and risk situations; or even as a problematic, insubordinate, and trouble-making condition versus a condition whose human capital is essential to the development and future of nations. Closer and more scientifically conducted perspectives in the transdisciplinary field of youth studies have uncovered the generalist fallacy of these assumptions, highlighting the cultural pluralities and structural inequalities that permeate the worlds of youth. Sociology that has Youth as its object of study, since Bourdieu2, recognizes that this category is nothing more than a word, plural in the meanings attributed to it and in the social images constructed around it, based on groups with different interests.
Recently, many representatives of these interest groups, coming from the spheres of design, implementation, and monitoring of public youth policies, activism and social movements, and various professional realms (youth workers, social assistants, primary and secondary school teachers, among others), have turned to academia to substantiate and validate their assumptions. This process has been observed in both Europe, including Portugal, and Latin America, particularly in Brazil. In higher education, they find in conceptual instruments the persuasive power and the scientific credibility they were searching for, overvaluing theoretical learning when compared to the methodological learning available to them. This posture, shrewdly identified by Brazilian historian Luís de Gusmão as concept fetishism - an attitude that leads to “deductive inferences from simple conceptual contents”3 - magically renders concepts capable of qualifying the scientific nature of the explanations and interpretations produced.
At this point, a fine line must be traced between the production of knowledge carried out in performing the “scientist’s work”, and the knowledge produced and shared in other professional and sociopolitical arenas, whether in the arena of activism, or the arena of more institutional politics, since politicians who act in this sphere of the State also commission studies, set up their observatories, or come to attend graduate programs with their research agendas. This line is traced based on the argument that it is the application of the method as a mediating device between concept and reality that defines science as a form of producing knowledge about reality, namely about social reality. The biggest difference - perhaps inequality - between scientific discourse and the opinion making discourse of the commentator, the pamphlet-like discourse of the politician, or the experiential discourse of the everyday subject is the application of methods and not the operationalization of concepts. With no mediation of methods, concepts operate more as labels for social reality, with their respective risks and perverse effects, than as devices for capturing and understanding social reality.
This argument is even more important in a context in which diverse conditions in European academia (but also in Brazilian academia) have fostered a progressive methodological abandonment: firstly, a context in which social research has been increasingly underfunded and the university has been corporatized, in which researchers are torn between the need to teach a high number of classes and publish to avoid perishing, and the desire to denounce and correct injustices and social inequalities with whatever is most readily available, falling into the temptation of resorting to concepts and imagining that, by using them proficiently, they are practicing social science.
It is no coincidence that we increasingly see the publication of articles based on purely theoretical discussions, often in a tone of social denunciation, but with little regard for the complexity and diversity of the social realities they seek to address. Not is it by chance that we find theses in which literature reviews take up more space than the demonstration of results, cultivating the illusion of the dissertation as a demonstration of knowledge, rather than the production of knowledge. Or that we come across works that mistake critical thinking for antagonistic thinking concerning that with which one disagrees for ideological reasons - when in fact critical thinking, in social sciences, is the thinking that leads to the revision of scientific interpretations overcome by new empirical discoveries, which show the inadequacies that exist in science and raise new questions that challenge existing knowledge.
From this mix of political and scientific challenges, the ones who stand to gain are the producers of fake news in the digital age we live in. This was evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, when several individual and collective populist actors dedicated themselves to producing and promoting fake news and conspiracy theories4,5, particularly about young people and their supposedly risky behaviors for intergenerational relationships through the hedonistic and convivial practices attributed to them6.
This context requires reestablishing the credibility of science as valid and relevant knowledge, whose production depends on extensive training and demanding preparation, of a theoretical and methodological nature. Recognizing, highlighting, and valuing the contribution method makes to the construction and validation of knowledge in “post-truth”7 times, negotiating relevance between research agendas and political agendas in the area of youth, and promoting the ethics of co-labor between researchers and young people, will certainly be a powerful weapon in combating populism, fake news, and conspiracy theories, as this article argues.
The praise of the method and the youth-friendly methods
One of the greatest wastes resulting from abandoning methodology is the squandering of opportunities for constructing new knowledge allowed in methodologically oriented empirical research processes. As teachers, supervisors, or reviewers of scientific journals, we very often come across works in which the realities that emerge from the interlocutors’ speeches and observations pass by researchers, as they are already armed with their preconceptions (that is, concepts not tested in the context of their interlocution), trying to make these concepts a reality in their research practice, and not - as they should - derive their research practice from these concepts8. These situations give rise to a science that is boxed, surrounded and defensive, dry and exhausted.
Pais9 inspires us to understand that the purpose of science is to solve enigmas, and that only through the lens of a method can scientists go beyond the surface and discover the various layers of the enigmatic reality they set out to study. When opting for a research design, one is opting for a way of articulating theoretical problems and empirical inquiry. In other words, one is opting for a certain part and version of reality, preferably still submerged. The choice of reality to be analyzed occurs precisely when the method is chosen, as an articulated set of procedures and techniques that delimit and touch reality. Therefore, the concepts that result from the mediation between enigma and method are what expose reality. Reality is not necessarily that which results solely and directly from the application of the concept.
If not mediated by method, concepts lose their deciphering status and become social categories that cannot only cover up important layers of reality, but also enable their reproduction and distorted dissemination, as well as enter the domain of self-fulfilling prophecies and self-sufficient discourses. This is what happens, to a great extent, with studies that propose to analyze youth practices and ways of life based on broad and uniformizing categories, such as categories whose objective is to qualify generations, and as a conceptual starting (and finishing) point, as discussed by Ferreira10.
However, if the starting point is the premises of plurality and inequalities in the social conditions, experiences and actions of young people (age, gender, social class, racial, ethnic, religious conditions, among others), through research methods that are appropriate and coherent with the enigma that we intend to solve and with the participants involved in it, we can find in the sociology of youth a sociology of revelations of the possibilities of social transformation, but also a sociology of reiterations, in which many young people express the revitalization of the same under feignedly new guises, or even a sociology of reproductions, of repetition, of mimesis, of the naturalized and taken-for-granted social.
I have always viewed youth research as a barometer for capturing emerging social trends in various aspects of everyday life. Without neglecting the focus on the continuities and forces of social reproduction to which they are subject, often only under “new guises,” youth worlds constitute, in fact, laboratories that constantly challenge the social sciences, both from a theoretical point of view - stimulating the creation of new concepts for understanding and explaining new realities - and from a methodological point of view - activating the need to create new instruments (or rethink the more orthodox ones) for capturing and deciphering these realities.
The plurality of experiences and social situations, the uncertainties and indecisions in expectations, the instability and provisionality in projects, the reversibilities and setbacks in itineraries, the massive visualization and digitalization of existences (of environments, bodies and practices), constitute new challenges in the social lives of young people that encourage new research trends in terms of theoretical approaches and research designs.
In this context, as discussed by several authors11-14, it is legitimate to question the method’s, as understood by paradigms of a more positivist nature - taken as a set of rules and methodological techniques to be followed in a standardized, systematic and supposedly impersonal way as a guarantee of a supposed status of scientific neutrality - the ability to deal with the new realities and complexities of the contemporary world that young people face; to understand and explain its tensions and contradictions; to embrace its instabilities, ambiguities, and uncertainties; to face its ephemerality, fleetingness, and fluidity; and, ultimately, to capture the unknown without calculations of predictability and expected results.
There are indeed serious risks in strictly following the straight-line paths suggested by methodology manuals, particularly when we are faced with research with young people and on youth realities in terms of sexual and reproductive health, an area still dominated by methodological imperatives imported from biomedical, standardized, and positivist models. Arming oneself with theoretical certainties and methodological rules to face the adventures that today’s youth worlds call for, along with taking refuge in following more standardized methods, is half the battle to going in circles and arriving at a known destination. Methods must be more creative and youthful, to be more youth-friendly15, that is, more agile in dealing with contemporary young people and the apparently chaotic nature of their lives.
Method is a path to follow, among countless possibilities, to answer a starting question. It corresponds to a set of technical procedures articulated to uncover an enigma, integrated into a research design that is embodied in a set of options and decisions that are taken by the researcher, and which aims to solve a theoretical problem (sometimes also a social problem) in need of explanation and/or understanding, anchored on a specific empirical field.
Thus, with each new challenge posed by the field, a new research method or design needs to be (re)invented. New realities of the contemporary world give rise to new starting questions, new areas of problematization, new fields for mining empirical data, and new ways of producing and managing this data. For these new conditions to result in adequate forms of sociological explanation and understanding, new methodological paths must be mobilized, with creativity, reflexivity, and pragmatism.
These paths are created as they are trodden. In other words, these are paths that must be flexible enough to adapt to new issues that emerge in the field, they must allow for experimenting, taking risks, improvising, going back and taking new directions, and even making mistakes (and pointing out and discussing these mistakes), so that the best ways to capture the complexities of today’s youth worlds can be found.
Methodological and positional reflexivity and classical techniques made youthful
Creativity and methodological innovation in research with young people should not be an end in themselves, but a response required by new challenges in the field, to assess the usefulness of exploring aspects of the social world that would otherwise be unknown or more difficult to access, such as bodies, intimacy, and youth sexualities, common areas of study in the field of sexual and reproductive health. From this perspective, airing out methodological orthodoxy does not necessarily involve leaving behind classical methods and techniques, but rather creatively adapting them, renewing them, and making them youth-friendly so that the possibility of young people participating in research seems attractive, interesting, and credible to them.
In a world where young voices rarely shape the public discourses produced around the categories of adolescence or youth (where the voices of figures, such as parents, teachers, doctors, psychologists and other “experts”, youth workers, political decision-makers, among others resonate with greater legitimacy), talking to young people and listening to the stories they have to tell in their own voice continues to be a privileged way of entering their lives, of understanding their lived experiences and subjective realities. In this sense, classic dialogic techniques, such as the individual interview and the discussion group, used alone or in conjunction16,17, continue to make sense in research on youth worlds. However, attention must be paid to the best way to operationalize them and reflect on them.
The conversations originated in individual or group interviews with adolescents and young people are dialogical practices of social interaction that, to produce dense, credible, and consistent narrated realities18, must take into account the particularities of the social positions of interlocutors, interviewees, and interviewers, as well as the respective contexts of narrative production. From this perspective, in the methodological approaches of concrete research, it is important to discuss and reflect on who asks, who answers and how they are accessed, what and how to ask in order to assess whether the strategies employed allow (or not) for interviews and focus groups to flow like everyday youth conversations, to ensure that the realities narrated during them are narrated as sincerely and comfortably as possible, and to circumvent and/or face the potential perverse effects arising from the specific positions (statutory, age, gender, social class, etc.) inherent in the dialogical and interactive process between interviewer and interviewee(s).
In other words, it is important to carry out an exercise of constant methodological reflexivity around the various options and decisions made along the research path, justifying each step and how it is coherent with the previous step (even if unforeseen). This implies moving beyond the purely descriptive tone typical of many methodological chapters, which often merely state the techniques used and list some characteristics of the interlocutors involved. It involves bearing witness to how the challenges we were exposed to in the research processes were methodologically addressed, and how they were resolved (or not). These testimonies become reflective insights that make the decisions (and indecisions) underlying the process of making empirical data transparent.
Nevertheless, the exercise of constant methodological reflexivity must be accompanied by an exercise of positional reflexivity on the effects of the presence of oneself in the contexts of empirical research. Researchers are in a social relationship, and the effects of their presence on the conditions of application and operationalization of the method are not neutral. These effects are not only related to scientists’ know-how, resulting from the various decisions they make during empirical research, but also as people and bodies that research, in the various statuses or positions they assume and that are attributed to them by their interlocutors, and which do not fail to affect the research process and its results.
Researchers’ bodies, as resources that operationalize methods and techniques, are not neutral research resources. And their scientists’ cloak19 does not protect them from feeling emotions in the field they investigate, nor does it make them invisible to the eyes of those with whom they interact. As researchers of young people, we are adults, academics, we dress and speak in certain ways, we are assigned color and gender, placing us in different social positions, generally positions of authority and privilege relative to the social positions of the young people with whom we interact. These, too, are undoubtedly the object of various attributions and reactions to our eyes and emotions during research work, before and during field work.
As discussed by many authors20-22, both in the theoretical and methodological decisions made about what, how, where, and with whom to work, and in the way fieldwork is conducted, the researcher’s personal characteristics and biographical experiences are always involved, as are their social attributes (age, gender, sexual orientation, social class, professional status, citizenship status, nationality, linguistic traditions, religious, political, and ideological beliefs, whether they are recognized as an insider or outsider in the fields where they work), the representations they have about their field of study, their states of mind and emotional responses to their interlocutors, the ways they present themselves and how they are received and interpreted, the stereotypes and expectations that fall upon them, the positions of power that are recognized or not recognized in the field by the interlocutors with whom they interact, among others.
Whether advantageous or limiting, whenever possible, it is important to recognize, clarify, and discuss these effects, so often camouflaged among the naturalizations of one’s presence in the field. Positional reflexivity thus takes the form of self-awareness, self-scrutiny, and deliberate self-monitoring of how our self- or hetero-attributed positions and preconceptions may influence the conduct of the research process and, consequently, the data and results produced from it.
From this perspective, the reliability of narrative data (or other observational or visual data) produced in conversations with and between young people is not associated with an assumed status of neutrality and impersonality guaranteed by the method, but rather with the researcher’s strategy of rigorous and transparent objectification of the conditions of social production of the results they reached, identifying and justifying the various options and decisions they made in the course of action underlying the research process, as well as the positions they assumed in it.
Visualizing youth existences and research co-creation techniques
The social experiences and cultural symbols that shape contemporary youth’s lives and identities are not only mediated by words in face-to-face conversations. These experiences and symbols are also, today more than ever, shared through images and in broad social media, such as cyberspace, where bodies, gender identities and sexualities, among other topics associated with the sexual and reproductive area of young people traditionally relegated to the private sphere, occupy public spaces in various ways, generating discourses and political discussions around identities, moralities, ways of life, and lifestyles. Today’s young people are not as invisible and inaudible as they once were. In fact, they are seen, heard, and read like never before. From a very early age, more and more children, adolescents, and young people are surrounded daily by screens of different natures and sizes, having access to electronic devices that provide them with a whole set of applications that mediate their sociability and socialization, configuring their worlds and their worldviews23,24.
Material devices - with content of a biographical nature, such as diaries or photo albums; of a group nature, such as fanzines or school newspapers, or of a communicational nature, such as landlines or pirate radio stations, were being replaced by immaterial applications and digital platforms such as social media, chats, blogs, phlogs, vlogs or video transmission channels (YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, TikTok), music (Soundcloud), or word (podcast), where content and practices of the same nature are reproduced on a large scale. Through them, young people have fun, socialize, communicate, buy, sell, study, work, get information, argue, protest, express their opinions, display their doubts, their skills and their existence, share affections and esthetic and ethical affinities, images of themselves and their loved ones, moments and situations in life, exposing themselves to reactions and comments from everyone to whom they give access. Digital networks are established in parallel to face-to-face networks. However, they are more comprehensive and complex than face-to-face social interactions, and new social and cultural practices are established in young people’s daily lives.
The massive participation, since childhood, of young people in online environments, where they spend a large part of their daily time, has constituted a theoretical and methodological challenge in youth studies, giving rise to new social realities that generate new data (the digital as a research field) and ways of producing data (the digital as a research tool), which require new research methods and challenge traditional research ethics when the boundaries between public/private/intimacy are blurred. Among the various types of empirical data and new forms of their production enhanced by the intensive use of digital technologies are visual data and the techniques and technologies that produce, systematize, or unfold them into new data. The relative democratization of the camera and video camera, technologies incorporated into smartphones and other gadgets, has promoted the intense and widespread social use of images (still or moving) among young people.
The possibility of easy, instantaneous, and widespread dissemination of images (produced by oneself or by others) in digital worlds has consecrated their social and symbolic relevance in youth sociability, seeing in them gains in existence and popularity among peers. The trend to visualize existence25 is omnipresent in the daily lives of young people, in experiences increasingly mediated by images of themselves and shared among themselves to communicate what they are (or what they want to appear to be) individually and socially. The taste for images and the technological and visual skills shared in youth worlds thus enhance the use of photography and video, simultaneously, as a research field and device in youth studies.
As a field of study, images are viewed as visual inscriptions that express meanings and portray social realities susceptible to analysis and interpretation, where investments, practices of body modification and maintenance, among other uses of young bodies are highlighted. This happens by considering the images themselves as an object of analysis, and/or taking them in their evocative capacity, when used as a triggering element for discourse and communication between different interlocutors - as seen with the photovoice technique, a discourse elicitation technique.
As a research device, images have been used as an object of production by the subjects studied, who are seen not only as producers of esthetic objects, but also as active collaborators in the research process itself. This happens when researchers mobilize the taste and technological and visual skills of the interlocutors to make their photographic reports or films on the topic under analysis.
In this sense, not only are researchers able to access the visual narratives constructed by the interlocutors on the topics assigned to them, but they are also able to access perspectives and details that would otherwise be difficult to access, either because they are not given due relevance in the context under study, or because their access is denied from the outset (such as bedrooms or certain places-gaps for markedly youthful practices), thus visually enhancing the richness of the ethnographic strategy carried out in co-creation by the young people and not constrained by the point of view focused by the researcher’s gaze.
This posture implies an alignment with the logic of current participatory research methodologies. From an epistemological standpoint, this methodological paradigm goes beyond the assumption of young people as privileged interlocutors in narrating about themselves, their experiences, and their worlds. It is a given that all methodological strategies used must make them protagonists of the research processes, as active narrators of their experiences and as experts better than anyone else in the worlds in which they live.
The researcher’s adoption of a comprehensive and active listening posture, close to the diverse ways young people experience and narrate the world, without imposing categories and narrative or visual sequences, enhances the attenuation of power relations in the research process, mutual understanding between the researcher and research participants, as well as the necessary conditions of trust, empathy, security, and involvement of young people in the research processes, with mutual interest among all those involved, including researchers and interlocutors. In this sense, an ethic of co-labor and co-creation of relevant knowledge among all parties involved in the course of research may be devised. This posture could mitigate the deep epistemic inequality that exists between researchers (generally academics and adults) and young participants in studies, as well as the impacts that such inequality can have on scientific results.
Towards an ethic of co-labor with young people
The current participatory ethos in research has expanded far beyond this epistemologically comprehensive configuration, particularly through the development of the well-known “participatory methods”. These are not limited to giving voice and listening to youth concerns and experiences based on their categories and discursive forms. These methods also, and above all, require the involvement of young people in methodological actions and decisions throughout the various stages of the research process, as active collaborators in the research and co-producers of mutually relevant knowledge. Their premise is to find ways to involve young people as active subjects in research and not as passive objects of research - which, in practice, leads to many possible forms of participation, in different stages (from the definition of the object of study to the analysis and interpretation of the data itself), and with greater or lesser capacity for youth intervention throughout the research process26.
My argument here, however, is not to favor research designs that must involve the application of participatory methods, but rather to prioritize some of the premises of these methods as ethical guidance, such as finding ways to involve interlocutors as active subjects in the research and not as mere passive objects of investigation - which, in practice, refers to many forms of possible co-labor in the co-creation of mutually relevant knowledge, in different stages (from the definition of the object of study to the analysis and interpretation of the data itself), and with greater or lesser capacity for intervention during the research process27.
In general, the participation of young people tends to be placed primarily at the level of their involvement in the data production process, namely narratives, and young people are included as interviewers or facilitators of conversations, or images, in which some visual techniques are not applied by the researcher, but by the young people themselves. However, participation also includes other techniques associated with creative work, such as art, workshops, documentaries, blogs, YouTube channels, or whatever is desired, with the aim of co-producing results that always involve collaboration between interlocutors and researchers. From this perspective, youth-friendly methodological use also implies adopting methods and techniques that make the research process more inclusive and participatory and, therefore, more attractive to young people. It implies recognizing, appreciating, and integrating young people as subjects of research and not as being subjected to research, in an epistemic attitude of collaborative knowledge production with and among young people28.
It is, therefore, an ethic that emphasizes the relationality present in the process of knowledge construction, since it explicitly recognizes that everyone - academics and non-academics alike - collaborates to investigate a question whose interest they share, and whose results or answers are realities always understood and interpreted through the experiences of these people in relation to each other. Thus, the hierarchical cleavage present in traditional processes of scientific otherization is deconstructed, that is, the cleavage between those who produce knowledge and “the others”, since knowledge is always produced in the mutual and interested relationship of all participants.
From this perspective, the co-labor research paradigm may constitute more of an ethical guideline than a set of methods pre-adopted in certain methodological approaches. This occurs especially in a context in which traditional dominant paradigms continue to reproduce the belief in the “neutral” and “asocial” status of the scientist in the research process, an understanding that continues to dominate in areas of biomedical influence, particularly in the field of sexual and reproductive health. By recognizing and putting into practice an ethic of co-labor in the production of knowledge, through the active, inclusive, and negotiated involvement of young people throughout the research process with youth, co-creating objectives, research instruments, or even sharing the role of researcher in the production and interpretation of data, more possibilities will arise for knowledge to become mutually relevant between academics and non-academics, adults and young people29,30.
Final considerations
The intrinsic relationality of the ethics of co-labor that I advocate for youth-friendly methods refers to an exercise of ethical reflexivity that goes beyond legal and normative regulations, which have been superimposing themselves on the guidelines previously prescribed by codes of ethics developed both in the health area and by many associations in the social sciences31. More than subsuming current ethical dilemmas and challenges under bureaucratic procedures, reflecting on research ethics involves critically reflecting on the objectives, processes, and implications of research on interlocutors in terms of potential harms and benefits of various kinds, throughout all phases of the research, from its design to its dissemination and communication to various audiences. In this process, it is important to articulate ethical reflexivity with methodological and positional reflexivity, as the main ethical challenges of research practice occur in the interactions between researchers and participants in research meetings, in the way they are voluntarily and consciously involved in the study, how we address them, what we ask of them, how we ask them questions and about what.
Making researchers think of themselves as social beings and of their research practice as a relational practice implies, on an ethical level, paying increased attention to the inequalities of power and epistemic injustices present in the relationships between researchers and research subjects32,33. The actions of researchers are not neutral in the development of starting questions, objectives, and ideas that underpin a research project from the outset, nor are they neutral in the implementation of these ideas and assumptions in the field, and in contact with research subjects. Research meetings bring together people from different and often unequal social backgrounds, potentially creating friction and tension related to issues of social class, gender, age, race or ethnicity, sexual orientation, neurodiversity, and many other social positions attributed to researchers and interlocutors.
Academic background tends to place the researcher in a position of authority and privilege relative to their interlocutors34: if, in the case of the researcher, their anchoring in a written culture and their diplomas grant them symbolic and social power to manage the voices that emerge in the research, in the case of interlocutors, they are often subject to multiple situations of vulnerability that add to their epistemic vulnerability. Ethical reflexivity implies explaining and understanding how the social positions of researchers dynamize and, ideally, mitigate these multiple dimensions of inequality in the way research is designed and conducted, in the way questions are asked or social situations are observed, in the way analyses and interpretations are produced from it, to ensure, in all these steps, conditions of mutual trust, interpersonal empathy, care and safety in the face of risks, non-violent communication (namely in the level and type of language used), and co-labor in identifying and deepening the space of the interlocutors’ points of view35 in the research process.
References
- 1 Ferreira VS. Imagens e políticas de juventude na viragem neoliberal. In: Oliveira VHN, organizador. Debates Sobre Juventudes. Porto Alegre: GEPJUVE; 2023. p. 214-236.
- 2 Bourdieu P. Questions de Sociologie. Paris: Editions de Minuit; 1984.
- 3 Gusmão L. O fetichismo do conceito: limites do conhecimento teórico na investigação social. Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks; 2012.
- 4 Bertuzzi N. Conspiracy theories and social movements studies: A research agenda. Soc Compass 2021; 15(12):1-16.
- 5 Gerbaudo P. The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest. London: Hurst Publishers; 2017.
- 6 Gouveia R, Almeida AN, organizadoras. Vidas confinadas: famílias, quotidianos e vulnerabilidades sociais no início da pandemia COVID-19 em Portugal. Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais; 2022.
- 7 McIntyre L. Post-truth. Cambridge: MIT Press; 2018.
- 8 Martins JS. Exclusão social e a nova desigualdade. São Paulo: Paulus; 1997.
- 9 Pais JM. Sociologia da Vida Quotidiana. Teorias, métodos e estudos de caso. Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais; 2002.
- 10 Ferreira VS. Jovens e gerações em tempos de crise: entre Portugal e o contexto global. In: Colaço V, Germano I, Miranda L, Barros JP, organizadores. Juventudes em Movimento: Experiências, Redes e Afetos. Fortaleza: Expressão Gráfica Editora, Universidade Federal do Ceará; 2019. p. 34-68.
- 11 Pais JM. Durkheim: das Regras do Método aos métodos desregrados. Análise Soc 1995; 30(131-132):239-263.
- 12 Law J. After Method. Mess in Social Science Research. Londres: Routledge; 2004.
- 13 Kara H. Creative Research Methods in the Social Sciences. Bristol: Policy Press; 2015.
- 14 St. Pierre EA. Post-Qualitative Inquiry, the Refusal of Method, and the Risk of the New. Qualitative Inquiry 2021; 27(1):3-9.
- 15 Heath S, Walker C, organizadores. Innovations in Youth Research. Londres: Palgrave Macmillan; 2012.
- 16 Ferreira VS. Artes e manhas da entrevista compreensiva. Saude Soc 2014; 23(3):979-992.
- 17 Ferreira VS, Raimundo A. Conversas entre jovens: o uso youth-friendly de grupos focais. In: Ferreira VS, organizador. Pesquisar Jovens. Caminhos e desafios metodológicos. Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais; 2017. p. 57-89.
- 18 Gubrium JF, Holstein JA. Analyzing Narrative Reality. London: Sage; 2009.
- 19 Clark JN. Post-research reflexivity in qualitative research: Through cloaks and cross-threading. Qualitative Res 2023; 24(4):1076-1085.
- 20 Adeagbo MJ. 'An 'outsider within': considering positionality and reflexivity in research on HIV-positive adolescent mothers in South Africa. Qualitative Res 2021; 21(2):181-194.
- 21 Bilotta N. A critical self-reflexive account of a privileged researcher in a complicated setting: Kakuma refugee camp. Res Ethics 2021; 17(4):435-447.
- 22 Folkes L. Moving beyond 'shopping list' positionality: Using kitchen table reflexivity and in/visible tools to develop reflexive qualitative research. Qualitative Res 2023; 23(5):1301-1318.
- 23 Bennett A, Robards B, organizadores. Mediated Youth Cultures. The Internet, Belonging and New Cultural Configurations. London: Palgrave Macmillan; 2014.
- 24 Feixa C. De la Generación@ a la #Generación. La Juventud en la Era Digital. Barcelona: NED; 2014.
- 25 Mirzoeff N. An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge; 1999.
- 26 Agbontean V, Greeney T, Larkins C, Lezdkalne B, Roy A, Sheehan D, Smith E, organizadores. Deepening collaborative research with children and young people: A co-edited and co-written special issue. Childhood 2024; 31(3):267-277.
- 27 MacLachlan A, Pemmasani P, Jamieson-Mackenzie I, McMellon C, Cunningham E, Lewis R, Tisdal E. Applying co-production principles in research: Reflections from young people and academics. Childhood 2024; 31(3):309-328.
- 28 Morch S. Researching youth life. In: Mixed Methods in Youth Research, Helve H, organizadora. Tampere: Juvenes Print; 2005. p. 29-56.
- 29 Chaffee R, Todd KT, Gupta P, May S, Abouelkheir M, Lagodich L, Wang J, Murphy C, Lawrence X. Methods for Co-researching With Youth: A Cross-Case Analysis of Centering Anti-Adultist Frameworks. Int J Qualitative Methods 2024; 23:1-18.
- 30 Paterson-Young C, Adhikari J, Lee L, Maher M, Wright LHV. Creating ownership: Strengths and tensions in co-production with children, young people, and adults across contexts. Childhood 2024; 31(3):329-348.
- 31 Hammersley M, Traianou A. Ethics in qualitative research. Controversies and contexts, Los Angeles: Sage; 2012.
- 32 Frers L, Meier L. Hierarchy and inequality in research: Practices, ethics and experiences. Qualitative Res 2022; 22(5):655-667.
- 33 McIntosh S, Wilder R. Toward Epistemically - Just Research: A Methodologies Framework. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 2023; 23(3):235-245.
- 34 Le Bourdon M. Confronting the Discomfort: A Critical Analysis of Privilege and Positionality in Development. Int J Qualitative Methods 2022; 21:1-8.
- 35 Bourdieu P. La misère du monde. Paris: Seuil; 1993.
The data sources adopted in the research are indicated in the article’s body.
