[Last modified: December, 4 2024 10:59 AM]
Case Study: Collection and use of data by HIV specialist midwives
A part-time Master’s student works in a job analyzing medical and social data collected by specialist HIV midwives in the UK and is responsible for organizing and analyzing these data. These midwives support HIV positive women and their babies from diagnosis to 6 weeks after birth. She proposed to interview a number of specialist midwives with whom she works professionally about their data collection activities and their attitudes to data and data-collection as well as other players in the administrative hierarchy who deal with data collection and recording as part of their job. The aim of the project was to understand how the midwives engagement with data collection, relates to their understanding of their roles, responsibilities and identities within institutional bureaucratic frameworks. After finishing her dissertation, she intends to return to work with the people she has interviewed.
Anthropology as a field has been described by my professor, Danny Miller, as the academic discipline which requires a great amount of empathy. Approaching a subject with an open mind, being willing to gain deep understanding through immersion and the ability to then step back and generate thinking which transcends the particular certainly requires empathy but it also requires courage.
In the case above, we see various ethical issues, the main one stemming from the researcher working for the organisation she is looking to research as an anthropologist.
Before critiquing this point, I first want to pause and empathise: Finding your field site, building connections and gaining trust from interlocutors can be daunting. Starting from scratch, doing fieldwork possibly for the first time and under the time pressure of a MA degree are all elements which can make someone feel vulnerable. Imposter syndrome might not be uncommon. The temptation to use a field site where you have prior knowledge and prior connections may therefore be very present. However, in the case described above, this leads to some serious ethical issues.
Firstly, the positionality of the researcher as a colleague blurs the line when commencing research: are her interlocutors having a conversation with her as a colleague or as a researcher? Would this create an environment in which the colleagues might break their own set of professional ethics and divulge information which they shouldn’t?
Secondly, being an employee as well as a researcher means that there is access to (patient) information which would not be accessible from a research perspective only. As awareness and consent would be lacking from the persons from whom the information stems, this should not be incorporated into the fieldwork.
Finally, when returning to her field site as a place of work, the research done will have an effect on power dynamics between herself, her peers and the management. This will put both the researcher as well as her colleagues in an uncomfortable position which could be harmful to all.
In this case, the best course of action would be to separate work and field site. An alternative may be to use connections to gain access to another institution doing similar data collection work or sacrifice employment and find different work several months before commencing field work.