Ethics

The ethics committee approval of my research was straightforward. The consent discussions that I had with participants after the first introductory meeting were fairly quick and uncomplicated. Appendix B contains the information and consent sheet that I circulated. There were two ethical issues of particular note that arose in the research, and both feature as a shift from matters of protocols and codes to matters of how to behave in the field and the development of personal relationships with research participants. The first concerns the lack of ability to control or

adequately define what would emerge from ethnographic research; the second refers to the use in my publicly available research outputs of talk about silence which included participants' personal discussion and evaluation of others in the group.

4.12.1 The ethics of not knowing in advance the research parameters

During the initial discussions about my research to negotiate access, one of the council employees emailed me to say that her line manager was fine with her participating in my research as long as my writing passed through their

communications team (though it was not clear what the team would do with my writing). I had some concerns that such a move, passing my writing to others in her organisation, would give her and the others in the group less protection rather than more. We agreed instead a compromise: that I would check how I was writing about the project with the participants themselves, to make sure I was fictionalising and anonymising details sufficiently well. However this was a cause of some concern for me, inasmuch as I did not know what I could commit to in advance, and what this compromise and checking with participants would actually mean in practice.

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An issue with ethnographic research and ethics is that ethnography is provisional, contingent and emergent (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007). The problem I encountered was to do with the prior unknowability of what I would find in my research on silence. There may have been a possible mismatch between participants' expectations and my own practice. One early response to this was to retain access to another project group for a while initially, in order to establish the sense of whether this group would be a suitable place for fieldwork to progress well. As it turned out, nothing significantly problematic happened, and my early fears subsided as I got to know the project group members better.

4.12.2 The ethics of telling or not telling other people's stories

The second ethical issue concerns the appropriate use in my research outputs of data relating what participants said about each other, and the impact this potentially may have on their continuing working relationships with each other. I had told

participants that I would talk to them in confidence and would anonymise data. However, this meant at times a compromised position in relation to others in the group during the data generation process, as I asked them questions but didn't engage in turn in answering their questions, or at least their inferred questions. I could either be seen as telling tales if I did engage, or as refusing to offer information that they knew I would know (withholding!). In this sense, ethics and reflexivity merged, as I had to consider what I could share and how I was positioning myself over the months.

Cunliffe and Karunanayake (2013), drawing on Michelle Fine's work, discuss the hyphen-spaces between the researcher and research participants, and the ongoing shifts of identity that take place in fieldwork. This issue was keenly felt by me and

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affected the data gathered in two ways: by me noticing my own silences that were then recorded in fieldnotes, and by my choice of response that impacted upon the way in which the conversation subsequently developed. For instance, in the exit interview with Paul, one of the County Council officers, he had referred to what had been perceived by many to be a difficult moment in one of the meetings, which had involved Sean, the university team lead. Paul said to me in the exit interview:

'I don't know if he [Sean] thinks he shouldn't have said it but .. he perhaps felt he had to say it.'

Paul would have known that I had already discussed with Sean his thoughts about the meeting, since I had had discussions by then with all the other project group members. In this conversation with Paul, I felt that his words were encouraging me to contribute what I knew about whether Sean thought he should not have said it. I made a conscious decision to ignore the encouragement. My deflecting response that followed his utterance was, in hindsight, ill-crafted:

'I think what's interesting about that is that er .. there was that big, well what I would call it, an argument in the meeting but then actually it all kind of blew over and it was all alright again, and I was really interested in that'.

It includes a value judgment on my part that dismisses the severity of Sean's behaviour, and that then leads to Paul agreeing that the group had been able to withstand such discomfort over the long run. If he had wanted to suggest that the situation did not become all alright again, my deflection sets up a conversational difficulty for him.

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The intersubjectivity of the research calls into question what is ethical or not to speak about: rules of ethics based on protocol are rarely straightforward to apply. My social role as researcher brought into play difficult issues of gossip (Foster, 2004; Linell, 2009, p.99), particularly because of the way in which I had constructed the research design, with the meetings being recorded and the post-meeting

conversations being less formal and more off-record. The identity of being a gossiper may be an interesting one to explore in relation to this research topic, although within the confines of this thesis, I can do no more than note its importance and move on.

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