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Ethics, Methods and Moving Standards in Research on Migrant Workers and Forced Labour

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Ethical Concerns in Research on Human Trafficking

Part of the book series: Studies of Organized Crime ((SOOC,volume 13))

Abstract

Universities, funders and professional bodies now have well-developed ethics policies and procedures in place to ensure research participants are fully informed and safeguarded and institutional reputational damage is prevented. These codes have coalesced around increasingly standardised core criteria, with the expectation that they will be adhered to by all employed and funded researchers. This chapter argues however that the dominance of standardised ethics frameworks is also problematic. Both qualitative and quantitative investigations inevitably involve researchers making ethics judgements which are relative and context specific as well. These judgements may be complex, and the outcomes they produce do not always align with standardised ethics frameworks. Drawing on six examples selected from our own research on labour migration and workplace exploitation, in particular on forced labour among migrant workers, we discuss the need to identify and reappraise the distinction between achieving ethical research ‘on paper’ (conformance with institutional ethics codes) and actually defining and ensuring ethical research in practice (i.e. allowing space for exercising individual ethics judgments).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This is taken from a university’s current codes of practice on research ethics.

  2. 2.

    In our own field of geography, there has been long-running and vigorous philosophising over morality and ethics (in a broad sense and not just in terms of research; see for example Barnett 2011; Smith 1997, 2000, 2001).

  3. 3.

    Details of the JRF forced labour programme can be found at: http://www.jrf.org.uk/topic/forced-labour.

  4. 4.

    Perhaps the most obvious early manifestation of the reorientation of state-funded social science research referred to in the text was the renaming of the Social Science Research Council as the Economic and Social Research Council.

  5. 5.

    Peer or community researchers may be defined as: ‘People who live within, and have everyday experiences as a member of, a particular geographical or social “community”, and who use their contacts and detailed lay knowledge in a mediating role, helping to gather and understand information from and about their peers for research purposes’ (Edwards and Alexander 2011, p. 269).

  6. 6.

    Within geography there has been recent emphasis on the need for more community participation and ‘co-production’ in academic knowledge creation and dissemination (see for example: North 2013; Pain et al. 2011).

  7. 7.

    Not to mention the pragmatic case for recognising that, as migrant workers, our participants may not have had a permanent UK address where a cheque payment could be sent to.

  8. 8.

    In our own discipline alone there is no single convention on how to credit authorship to those have contributed to but have not actually analysed or written up a research (for an interesting discussion of this see Hawkins et al. 2011).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Natural and Social Sciences, University of Gloucestershire, Francis Close Hall Campus, Cheltenham, UK

    Sam Scott

  2. School of Social Sciences, University of Dundee, Nethergate, Dundee, Scotland, UK

    Alistair Geddes

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  1. Sam Scott
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  2. Alistair Geddes
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Correspondence to Sam Scott .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Willem Pompe Institute, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Dina Siegel

  2. Willem Pompe Institute, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Roos de Wildt

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Scott, S., Geddes, A. (2016). Ethics, Methods and Moving Standards in Research on Migrant Workers and Forced Labour. In: Siegel, D., de Wildt, R. (eds) Ethical Concerns in Research on Human Trafficking. Studies of Organized Crime, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21521-1_8

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