Ethical Concerns in Qualitative Research: Experience from the Field

It is the intention of the authors’ to inform that there are rules of thumb that qualitative researchers should adhered to in order to fulfill their ethical obligations to the participants. The primary rule of thumb is that as a qualitative researcher caring about the data is significant. This is due to the fact that a qualitative researcher commonly delve into social lives of human being and that ensuring rights, privacy and welfare of the human being is therefore crucial. Hence, this article shares the authors’ experiences about the ethical issues when doing qualitative research. The ethical issues revolve around the authors’ concern about data sensitivity, data handling, voluntary participation, confidentiality, anonymity, legitimacy, controversial data, interpretation and off-record data. Each issue will be explain and the practical examples of how each issue was dealt with will be shared. Most importantly, this article shares ideas of how qualitative researchers should care about their participants, and embrace the honesty and trust given by the participants. Overall, this article shows that caring for participants should be taken seriously, and giving respect to the participants result in building strong relationship between the researcher and the researched, which is important for any qualitative research to gain credible and quality findings. The article contributes to giving real time experiences that are useful for researchers embark in qualitative research. Lesson learnt from the authors’ experience could guide other researchers to minimize any harmful consequences to the participants. In sum, this article contributes to providing greater insight into how to handle ethical dilemma