Ethical Considerations

Finally now I consider the ethics of my approach in the Project and how I safeguarded the well-being of my co-researchers (Silverman 2011).

As an accredited executive coach with EMCC and an accredited coaching supervisor with APECS, I have two clear Ethical Codes to inform my professional practice (EMCC 2010a, APECS 2007). All the participants likewise were accredited members of professional coaching associations and were thus informed by some core ethical guidelines including not doing any harm and observing confidentiality. My experience of co- creating coaching and supervision agreements with my clients prepared me well for open and robust conversations with the participants around the ethical issues germane to the Research Project and their engagement in it.

However, Fillery-Travis (2009) challenges us as researchers to consider what else we might need to pay attention to especially in terms of the data which the participants share with us. As this Project was based on PAR methodology, it was inevitable that the participants would be involved in interventions and make changes to their existing situations, thus likely to affect themselves and/or their clients. In the case of the coaches, their inquiry may have impacted on how they engaged with their supervisors. Likewise for the supervisors, their engagement in the Project may have impacted on the supervisees they selected to involve in their reflections. For the purpose of this Project, I refer to these parties as “working partners”.

To attend to both of these elements i.e. the participants and their working partners, the Informed Consent document (Appendix 4.4) contained all the

relevant information about the Project - its purpose, timing, personal and professional commitments. I discussed this personally with each

individual participant when I confirmed their selection in the Project. I sent this letter to them in advance so they had time to consider the implications for themselves in participating and could ask questions when we met as groups. I also reaffirmed clearly their expected level of participation, terms of confidentiality and the freedom to withdraw at any time when we met at the Induction Meetings.

By involving the Coaching Associations who sent out the initial

announcement along with an invitation to contact me if they wished to participate, the people who responded did so entirely voluntarily. Once we started working together, I sought their confirmation that their working partners had been informed of their involvement, sharing the Informed Consent letter with them. We agreed that all reference to working partners was anonymised as was all reference to clients and organisations

associated with participants from either group.

Silverman (ibid) stresses the need to build trust between all the

participants in a research project. I believe that trust can only be built over time and again my experience as a supervisor served me well. As lead researcher I did this by being transparent, authentic, and reliable. I communicated regularly, by email and phone, with individuals in both groups between ALS meetings. Together we built trust through spending time getting to know each other, through being explicit about how we would work together, by agreeing our collective terms of confidentiality for the Project (Hay 2007, Schein 1999). I was fastidious in anonymising their individual identities in all transcripts and their reflective notes as well as any references they made to client organisations. Perhaps a strong indicator of their trust in me and each other was how readily they shared their personal biographies/CVs, their reflective notes and their experiences with each other in the ALS meetings.

There are also the implicit considerations such as the power relationships which may inevitably exist in Action Research and in my role as lead researcher, alongside whatever the participants may have projected on to me because of my reputation and/or how I showed up within the group (Silverman 2011, Cook 2010). Again here I believe that by being authentic and transparent I was able to dispel some of these pressures, and was mindful of ensuring that we attended to our psychological contract in terms of respect, safety, time and attention for each person (Carroll 2005). I am also mindful of the potential for the participants to recognise each other from the text as I describe incidents within each cycle of inquiry.

I have held all materials such as digital recordings, electronic transcripts and learning journals on a Password encrypted computer. My business book-keeper is the only other person who holds this Password and she does not access my computer in my absence.

4.8 Summary

I consider that I developed a Project that would meet the AR criteria of validity, robustness and trustworthiness of the inquiry (Herr & Anderson (2005), Bradbury & Reason (2001)) in terms of the quality and level of participants’ critical reflection, the professional skills and experience of the participants as well as the underpinning and structure of the Project.

In closing this section, I offer the following:

“We believe that the outcome of good research is not just books and

academic papers, but is also the creative action of people to address matters that are important to them. Of course, it is concerned too with revisiting our understanding of our world, as well as transforming practice within it.” (Heron & Reason 2001:144)

We have now come to the end of Part 1 of this Project Report where I have established my identity as practitioner-researcher, the context in which the Project was developed in light of the current literature, my rationale for and selection of research methodology and I have described the actual Project Activities.

As we move into Part Two I will now tell the story of the implementation and outcomes of the Project Activities. This falls into three Chapters: Chapter 5: Coaches’ Group Outcomes, Chapter 6: Supervisors’ Group Outcomes and Chapter 7: Comparison of the two groups’ Outcomes. Chapters 5 and 6 cover each of the ALS Meetings with the research groups where I describe what happened. I distil and present the key data that emerged in each session and offer my own reflections and questions prompted by the process, the data and the impact this was having on the Project and me. In Chapter 7 I draw the themes of both groups together and discuss the similarities and differences between the two groups that subsequently inform my Conclusions in Part 3, Chapter 8 and Chapter 9.