Sources for Thinking About the
Ethics of Sociolinguistic Research
Prof.
Peter L. Patrick
Dept of Language & Linguistics
Please send new info to patrickp at my
email, @essex.ac.uk
There are not enough materials aimed at
sociolinguistics students and practitioners to help us understand, think through,
apply and change the application of ethical principles to our research
planning, data collection, analysis, publication and archiving. This webpage is
designed to make a contribution, mainly by organizing other peoples’ work on
the topic.
o
Links to online
codes of ethics, statements, etc. for linguists
o
Codes of practice and resources from other disciplines
o
Notes on the relevance of medical models
o
A brief bibliography,
and
Links to online Codes of Ethics, Statements, and Legislation
The Linguistic Society of America has a short statement cautioning
about mechanical application of guidelines from other disciplines to linguistic Research with Human Subjects. Other resolutions
and codes etc. of the LSA, including their general statement about ethics of linguistic research,
are available here.
The American Anthropological
Association has a number of more detailed statements, including Principles of Professional Responsibility and a Statement on Problems of Anthropological Research and Ethics,
both available here. Their general page on ethics has many resources as well – many
are applicable, as linguistics has always been considered one of the four
primary fields of anthropology, and sociolinguistics has an even closer
lineage.
The British
Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) has a webpage of
Recommendations on Good Practice In Applied Linguistics (1994) which
covers a number of key areas, including research relationships and
responsibilities to informants, as well as useful references to codes and
guidelines drawn up by social science researchers in the British Isles. A short
version of the statement, suitable for undergraduate student
projects, is also available.
In the
Codes of Practice and Resources
from Other Disciplines
The American
Psychological Association code
dates from (2002).
The American
Sociological Association has one of the most detailed codes (adopted 1997), with
wide and explicit coverage.
The National Communication Association, fittingly, has a clear and straightforward
one, which addresses many different areas of academic life explicitly,
including not just publication but, for example, research, teaching,
student/staff and collegial relations,
editing and other organisational activities (grant writing, reviewing, planning
conferences etc.), and community service.
A number of independent centers organize materials on ethical practices. Among them
are the Center
for the Study of Ethics in the Professions (CSEP), which not
only has many codes online but provides guidance to using them via case study.
Others are The Online Ethics Center for Engineering & Science, at Case Western University, with an engineering focus but
a good topics page and even a help-line, as well as some additional codes (e.g.
of student organizations; and some in Spanish). A Canadian organization, the Centre
for Applied Ethics at British Columbia
University, is also good and long sponsored an excellent website on resources in applied ethics, which has now moved to www.ethicsweb.ca.
Historically influential
documents such as the Nuremberg Code (1949), the Belmont
Report (1979) – both US Govt. documents – and the Helsinki Declaration (1964, rev. 2002) of
the World Medical Association are also relevant. These links are hosted by the
US National Institutes of Health on their Ethical
Guidelines page.
Notes on the Relevance of
Medical Models
Many of these classic documents
were developed to apply to medical experimental ethics. These are of course
relevant for linguists working in clinical spheres, who will have no choice but
to satisfy the requirements of medical oversight bodies, and should certainly
do so. They may also be relevant, however, for understanding where many of the
professional associations’ assumptions and norms derive from.
In the UK, the National
Health Service (NHS) oversees research in its branches.
Nationally, standards by which research proposals are evaluated, and permission
granted or withheld, are established and maintained by the National Research
Ethics Service (NRES), though they are administered within
local jurisdictions by LRECs (Local Research Ethics Committees). PhD students
working with me and collecting data within the NHS have found that these
processes are very lengthy and detailed, as is appropriate, but also that they
apply strong expectations derived from medical experimental research –
concerning such things as sampling, statistical analysis, informed consent, etc. – to qualitative
linguistic research, with little leeway granted for different research
traditions. Since linguists may have to choose between making out a case for
different research traditions (in addition to providing all the required
documentation), and adapting their methods and practices to fit medical
expectations, it is best to be very familiar with the requirements and mindset,
as early as possible! In an earlier draft proposal concerning “Ethical Governance and Regulation of Student
Projects”, the NHS declared its belief that student projects, “whether they
occur at undergraduate or graduate level, are not designed to generate new knowledge”.
Clearly, (even student) linguists working within the NHS have different
assumptions, training and beliefs about their research.
In the USA, the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) has an Office of Human
Subjects Research which provides guidance, including their
research guidelines (the “Gray Booklet”) and the relevant federal
laws (Title 45 CFR Part 46).
They recommend this online training module for medical
research, which satisfies requirements on grantees to have up-to-date education
in ethical responsibilities.
I have developed some materials on permissions/consent forms
(referred to as “releases” in my course materials):
o
a generic
form is here in PDF form,
o
some
comments as to how and why I use it, here,
o
and a “Data Request Form”, useful in formalizing
arrangements when exchanging data between two researchers (including students
whose research I am supervising).
I’m currently Ethics Coordinator
for student research in my Dept.; our materials are here. University of Essex rules and
materials are here.
(NB: I have not
updated this actively in recent years)
Cameron, D., E.
Fraser, P. Harvey, M.B. Rampton & K. Richardson. 1992. Ethics, advocacy and
empowerment: Issues of method in researching language.
Garner, Mark, Raschka, Christine & Sercombe, Peter G. 2006.
Sociolinguistic minorities, research, and social relationships.
Heller, Monica, et al.
1999.
Sociolinguistics and public debate.
Labov, William. 1982. Objectivity and commitment in
linguistic science: The case of the Black English trial in
Larmouth, Donald W. 1992. The legal and ethical status of surreptitious
recording in dialect research: Do human subjects guidelines apply? Pub. of
the American Dialect Society 76:1-14
Morgan, Marcyliena. 1994. The African-American speech community: Reality and
socio-linguists. In Morgan, ed., The social construction of identity in creole situations: 121-48.
Murphy, E & R Dingwall. 2001. The ethics of ethnography. In P Atkinson, A
Coffey, S Delamont,
Murray, Thomas E., and
Carmin Ross-Murray. 1992. On the legality and ethics of
surreptitious recording. Publication of the American Dialect Society 76:
15-75.
Murray, Thomas E., and
Carmin Ross-Murray. 1996. Under cover of law: More on the
legality of surreptitious recording. Publication of the American Dialect
Society 79: 1-82.
Rickford,
Sercombe, Peter G.,
Garner, Mark & Raschka, Christine, eds.
2006. Sociolinguistic research – Who wins? Research on, with or for
speakers of minority languages.
Shuy, Roger W. 1986. Ethical issues in analyzing FBI
surreptitious tapes. International
Shuy, Roger W. 1993. Risk, deception, confidentiality
and informed consent. Review of PADS 76, Legal and ethical issues in
surreptitious recording. American Speech 68:103-106.
Wald, Benji. 1995. The problem of scholarly predisposition: G Bailey, N Maynor & P Cukor-Avila eds., The emergence of Black
English: Text and commentary. Review article.
Wolfram, Walt. 1998. Scrutinizing linguistic
gratuity: Issues from the field.
Writings by Larmouth and Murray &
Ross-Murray deal fairly comprehensively with legal issues surrounding
informed consent for audio recording in the US in the late 1980s and early
1990s, including extensive case citations. Legal issues predominate in the
discussion (though some authors are linguists) so they're of limited value
outside N. America, but they're discussed in the context of ethical approaches
too, and a situation-ethics analysis is recommended by the authors.
Shuy 1986 is based on the author's
extensive experience in testifying in legal cases involving wiretap data, a
field in which he is the leading figure. Shuy 1993
is a severe criticism of Larmouth 1992 and Murray &
Ross-Murray 1992, based on this experience. It is responded to at length
in Murray & Ross-Murray 1996 (this also
includes a discussion and legal sources for Canadian law and video recording),
who focus instead on everyday data collection issues.
Cameron et al. 1992
is an extended critique of method that makes many useful points, though its
basis is a critique of positivist research method in social science - certainly
not everyone will accept their philosophical arguments, which underpin their
main conclusions. They concentrate on Labov 1982 as
a case study of the Advocacy framework, of which it is an excellent example; it
reviews a famous case of minority and vernacular language education issues
which were litigated in the 1970s, and in which sociolinguists played a major
role.
(Further and more recent
perspectives on these issues in this community can be derived from Morgan 1994 and Rickford
1997; see also Heller et al. 1999.)
Wolfram 1998
focuses on the particular issue of what a linguist is obligated to give back to
the community she studies (cf. also Labov 1982's
"principle of the debt incurred," ancestor of the
"gratuity" principle via Cameron et al.), and raises problems in
implementing this in practice, and questions about motive involved even in such
apparently "empowering" approaches.
Many dissertations discuss
fieldwork and its ethical problems; these rarely make it into the published
version, as either the writers or their mentors/editors are socialized into
thinking this stuff is not as important as "the data" or "the
theory".
Obviously, sociolinguists stand
to learn much from other, older, and sometimes better-organized disciplines on
these matters. In particular it's worth checking out anthropological debates
and ethnographies; codes of practice drawn up by social-science researchers
(see above), grant agencies, and government departments that sponsor or
regulate research; and fieldwork dissertations' chapters on methodology, which
sometimes go into such issues at greater length than is common in journal
articles or monographs.
Peter L Patrick’s
course in Sociolinguistic Methods I
Peter L
Patrick's page of Links and Resources
Last updated 12 October 2010