Beyond bureaucratic ethics in qualitative research involving human beings

Abstract

Ethical commitments in studies involving human beings have been considered for a few decades. However, concerns to which researchers commonly restrict themselves are understood as typical of the so-called formal ethics (e.g. anonymity, informed consent, and absence of fraud). In this article, while defending that this type of ethics, also called bureaucratic ethics, needs to be superseded, we share and illustrate a materialized example of ethics advocated for in human science research, namely, the emancipatory ethics. This example is provided by the doctoral thesis of the first author, under the guidance of the second one, and presented with epistemological, ontological, methodological and ethical considerations from the beginning to the end of the inquiry process. This text is based on principles of emancipatory research (CAMERON et al., 1992), ethics of caring (NODDINGS, 1984), and ethical and methodological considerations from Denzin (1997) and Christians (2006) for social and human research. In short, this article demonstrates ways of distributing power and incorporating the voices of participants into research practice.