7.1: Doing Research with People

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Doing Research with People

Before we go further, I want to bring to your attention a crucial aspect of this work—you will be working with and researching people. Unlike doing scholarly work on existing texts and journals or even chemicals, working with living subjects, and people in particular, is tightly controlled at the university level. Your university likely has an IRB, an institutional review board, that will govern your official inquiry to create new scholarly knowledge. The goal behind these processes is to protect the folks you’re researching from harm.

In the private sector, there aren’t as many controls on researching with people, and so the primary goal that you should strive for in your research in these cases is consent and transparency. You need to make sure folks know what is going on and what you’re doing and that they agree with you and your goals and methods. Research should help you out, yes, but it should also at the very least do no harm to those you work with. If you’re researching folks, they need to know and they need to consent. Anything less is unethical. Yes, you may need to hide specifics about which particular design they’re working with, but they need to understand what is happening and what you’re going to do.

In particular, you need to guard personal information—anything you collect needs to be anonymous and needs to be impossible to trace back to your participants in a way that could cause them harm. This is your duty to the folks you research in private settings. In addition, you need to make them aware of how you’re taking notes/recording content and how you’ll store that data and anonymize it as needed.