ETHICS AND POLITICS IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Getting straight on ethics in qualitative research is not an internal matter only. Putting ethics and politics together is the right move intellectually, but it engages a major agenda beyond adjustments in qualitative theory and methods. The overall issue is the Enlightenment mind and its progeny. Only when the Enlightenment’s epistemology is contradicted will there be conceptual space for a moral-political order in distinctively qualitative terms. The Enlightenment’s dichotomy between freedom and morality fostered a tradition of value-free social science and, out of this tradition, a means-ends utilitarianism. Qualitative research insists on starting over philosophically, without the Enlightenment dualism as its foundation. The result is an ethical-political framework that is multicultural, gender inclusive, pluralistic, and international in scope.