Abstract
The concept of research integrity has gained increasing public salience in recent times. The chapter deals with a crucial aspect of this in the context of social research – what can be referred to as epistemic integrity. This amounts to a practical commitment to values that are intrinsic to all research activity, given that its goal is the production of worthwhile knowledge. These values include: truth and justifiability of findings, their relevance to human concerns, feasibility of strategies, and honesty about the research process. The implications of these values are outlined in relation to the various stages of research, from selecting and developing research questions to reporting research findings and engaging with critics who dispute the findings or question the methods. A central theme is that, as with ethical issues, these values do not amount to specific injunctions, nor can they be satisfied simply by following standard procedures. Instead, researchers must exercise reflective judgment about what epistemic integrity demands in particular circumstances.
Much of the thinking behind this chapter was stimulated by a seminar on Scientific Integrity in Qualitative Research organized by Lakshmi Balachandran Nair, Utrecht University, September 2017. Gerben Moerman, of the University of Amsterdam, in particular, supplied encouragement and information about recent cases of scientific fraud in the social sciences.
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Notes
- 1.
Of course, integrity has long been recognized as an important moral quality, in relation to research and more generally. As regards research, it is central to Weber’s (1917, 1919) notions of “value freedom” and “science as a vocation,” and its general ethical importance can be traced back to the writings of Aristotle.
- 2.
The task of gaining clarity here is not eased by the fact that there are also problems with the meaning of “research ethics”: Hammersley and Traianou 2012: Chap. 1.
- 3.
On the notion of a post-truth world, Leith (2017) provides a useful review of some books on this topic.
- 4.
In the terms I am using here, and the point I am making, the last part of what Israel writes should read: “the prospects of a lack of epistemic integrity on the part of researchers.”
- 5.
This criticism has also been applied to some areas of natural science. For a spirited recent contribution to the debate about “meaningful” research, see Alvesson et al. (2017).
- 6.
The attempts at strategic management that Polanyi criticized (which, interestingly, were partly prompted by the Soviet Union’s “planning” of science) are also at odds with academic freedom, which has an elective affinity with the endogenous model of scientific organization he proposes. On academic freedom and the threats to it, see Fish (2014), Traianou (2015), and Hammersley (2016).
- 7.
Examples include Becker’s article “Whose side are we on?” (Becker 1967), on which see Hammersley (2000: Chap. 3), and Rosenthal and Jacobson’s (1968) Pygmalion in the Classroom. Sometimes this sort of distortion derives from the feeling that some ideas or findings are “too good to be false” (see Hammersley 2011: Chap. 5).
- 8.
Of course, deciding what data are required and how to obtain them is not simply based on what is most appropriate for the initial research questions. Indeed, as I have noted, these questions may change, not least as a result of the data collected – an interactive process is involved here. Also relevant is the existing competence of the researcher in relation to particular methods. Few, if any, researchers can be competent in the use of all methods. However, what this ought to mean is that research questions are selected partly in terms of whether they are amenable to the methods which the researcher is able to deploy.
- 9.
Prudential considerations here relate to such matters as whether a particular method would carry a serious risk of some sort for the researcher. For example, while the best data for a study may come from direct observation by the researcher in some setting, careful consideration should be given to what this would involve and the dangers that may be associated with it. For a discussion of this issue in the case of qualitative research, see Bloor et al. (2010). Ethical considerations are also relevant as well, of course, but I leave these aside here because they have been well-covered in the literature on research ethics.
- 10.
While it may be possible to collect important data through being a participant, it must be remembered that the demands of a role such as that of teacher may prevent collection of much of the data that an observer in the classroom could obtain, even if there is experiential data made available thereby that an observer would have less easy access to. Furthermore, playing an established role in the field will shape one’s relationships with others, beneficially in some ways perhaps (for example, to continue with the example, improving relations with other teachers in the school) but also perhaps in undesirable ways (for example, in shaping relations with the students).
- 11.
It is important to recognize that what is involved here is not a simple dichotomy but a multidimensional space, so that there is much scope for variation. We should note, for example, that Qualitative Comparative Analysis and perhaps also Analytic Induction, methods that may be qualitative rather than quantitative in other respects, require a categorization process that allocates items to one and only one of some set of categories, by contrast with grounded theorizing and many other kinds of qualitative analysis. Furthermore, there is no reason, in principle, why thematic categories cannot be refined and developed into the sort of category system required for counting and recording frequencies.
- 12.
There are also more specific issues, for example, about how far to go in data reduction, where there may be a trade-off between delicacy in representing variation and ensuring that categories have a sufficient number of cases in them for statistical or some other form of analysis.
- 13.
Significantly, there are several versions of each of these approaches.
- 14.
It perhaps needs to be underlined here that what information is necessary may vary according to the audience being addressed. For instance, there is an interesting and difficult question about how much information ought to be provided about methodology to lay audiences: they often have little interest in this, and yet they ought to take it into account in evaluating the findings.
- 15.
This is rarely possible within the constraints of an article or even a book. It may be possible, of course, for the data to be supplied in appendices or online, though the protection of confidentiality may be a barrier to this. There is also the problem that in some kinds of qualitative research, notably ethnography, even if all of the recorded data were archived this would not give access to what are sometimes referred to as “headnotes”: memories and tacit knowledge built up by the researcher during the course of fieldwork (Sanjek 1990; Pool 2017; van der Port 2017). It is perhaps also worth emphasizing that, even where all the evidence is provided, readers must still exercise trust in accepting what is presented as authentic, at least until there are signs that trust is not warranted. Research cannot be made “fully transparent.” And there are deep questions about what level and kind of trust it is reasonable to expect readers to have in researchers – here we go back to the problem of a post-truth world and the question of whether social science research has itself become corrupted.
- 16.
This journal also sometimes publishes poems not based on research, see for instance Hammersley 2019.
- 17.
There are further aspects of integrity associated with playing the role of a reviewer for journals, publishers, and funding bodies; editing journals; evaluating colleagues in appointment and promotion committees; and so on. In relation to editing journals and refereeing articles, there are questions not just about detecting fraud, or about what is and is not worth publishing, but also about the danger of publication bias arising from the failure to publish statistically nonsignificant, inconclusive, or negative findings. There are also, of course, issues of integrity relating to academic teaching.
- 18.
All of this raises the interesting question of what are the necessary preconditions for the healthy operation of research communities (see Hammersley 2002: Chap. 5). A good case could be made that current conditions are increasingly inhospitable to the cultivation of epistemic research integrity.
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Hammersley, M. (2020). On Epistemic Integrity in Social Research. In: Iphofen, R. (eds) Handbook of Research Ethics and Scientific Integrity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76040-7_16-1
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