The Politics of Data Access in Studying Violence across Methodological Boundaries: What We Can Learn from Each Other?

In this article, we investigate where the ethics of data collection and access of two widely disparate methodological approaches studying violence intersect, and we explore how these respective intellectual communities can learn from each other. We compare and contrast the research strategies and dilemmas confronted by researchers using quantitative methods to collect and analyze “big data” and those by researchers conducting interpretivist ethnography grounded in the method of participant observation. The shared context of participant vulnerability produces overlapping concerns about our work. With shifts in quantitative conflict research to examine the microdynamics of violence, quandaries of confidentiality and the ethics of exposure have become increasingly salient. At the same time, ethical dilemmas that arise in the large-scale collection of data offer important points of reflection regarding the ethics of participant observation as it is performed in ethnographic research. Instead of focusing on areas of disagreement, we suggest that interpretivist fieldworkers and quantitative researchers can learn from how the politics of information materialize across divergent research methods