Between Research Ethics and Other Interests: Challenges for Historians of Education

Abstract

Increasingly, researchers meet ethical dilemmas when doing funded scientific research. In the last few decades, there is a shift in the power balance between funding agencies and researchers which may influence all stages of doing research, such as the formulation of the research subject and question, research methods used, conclusion and publication of results. So funders often specify or suggest a methodological approach and exert pressure to keep part of the results a secret or re-write reports. Researchers could even have to cope with the seduction of accommodating research results because of possible funding in the future. This could lead to studying non-problems or not investigating important but for the funding agency risky subjects. These challenges for researchers were also present in the recent research into historical child abuse in homes and foster families, funded by the Dutch government installed Samson-committee. In the projects funded, researchers had to cope with interests of several institutions and groups, among them the state, also the funding agency of the research. For example, research results showed that sexual abuse was not put on the agenda of the inspectorate, part of the government bureaucracy, while even critical pressure groups and the media only started to report comprehensively on child abuse from the late 1980s.

But although the government thus was at the same time funder and subject of the investigations, this possible incompatibility of interests was countered by the autonomy researchers got from the committee itself to develop the whole research project within the given subject and research question. It is a challenge for researchers to resist in such situations possible temptations to conform to interests of others, and to remain critical and independent and so maintain to their academic ethics.