Navigating Ethical Dilemmas: The Value Landscape Behind Fieldwork Decisions

Paper Title

Navigating Ethical Dilemmas: The Value Landscape Behind Fieldwork Decisions

Publication Info

• Topic area: Ethical decision-making in research fieldwork, focusing on values and tensions.
• Keywords: Ethics, fieldwork, HCI, values, ethical dilemmas, decision-making, value tensions, situational ethics, reflexivity, research practice.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing ethical guidelines, codes of conduct, and formal ethics reviews fail to address the unpredictable and context-specific ethical dilemmas researchers encounter during fieldwork. Little is known about how researchers’ values inform their decisions in practice.
• Significance: Understanding how values guide ethical decision-making is crucial for improving research practices, fostering participant trust, and addressing the complexities of fieldwork in diverse contexts.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work highlights the limitations of procedural ethics and the importance of situational and in-action ethics. However, these frameworks provide limited insight into how researchers reflect on or justify decisions during ethical dilemmas, leaving a gap in understanding how values are mobilized and negotiated in practice.

Solution

• Proposed approach: The study investigates researchers’ value enactment through participatory workshops, identifying values that guide fieldwork and recurring tensions that arise during ethical dilemmas.
• Novelty:
  1. A collection of professional values that underpin researchers’ practices, extending current understandings of values in design research.
  2. Seven reflexive questions highlighting recurring value tensions in fieldwork, serving as prompts for ethical reflection and team alignment.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted four participatory workshops with 21 researchers from six nationalities.
  • Activities included value mapping, ethical dilemma exploration, and open reflection.
  • Analyzed workshop data using reflexive thematic analysis to identify guiding values, tensions, and ethical dilemmas.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Identified seven key values: Usefulness, Transparency, Care, Pragmatism, Supportiveness, Trust, and Empathy.
  • Developed seven reflective questions to address value tensions (e.g., “Am I being transparent or tactical?”).
  • Highlighted two dynamics: value erosion (neglecting values under pressure) and value overextension (rigid application leading to unintended consequences).
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Extends situational and in-action ethics by addressing overlooked or compromised dilemmas.
  • Provides a nuanced understanding of how values shift between guiding principles, aspirations, and sources of tension.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Workshops included researchers with diverse fieldwork experience, covering various methods (e.g., interviews, usability tests, co-design workshops).
  • Validation through participant feedback on preliminary findings and analysis.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Limited geographic and institutional diversity; most participants were from Portugal.
  • Focused on academic researchers; industry and non-Western contexts remain unexplored.
  • Future work includes longitudinal studies, broader stakeholder inclusion, and developing tools for ethics education.

Summary

This study explores how researchers navigate ethical dilemmas in fieldwork by examining the role of values in decision-making. Through workshops with 21 researchers, the authors identified seven key values and recurring tensions, proposing reflective questions to support ethical deliberation. The findings highlight the dynamic nature of values, which can be eroded or overextended under pressure, and offer practical insights for fostering ethical reflection in research teams. Future work aims to develop tools for ethics education and expand the study to diverse contexts and stakeholders.