Book Reviews
Author | Anne Robinson, Jake Phillips |
Ethics & Values In Social Research
Paul Ransome (2013) Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. pp.200. £23.99 (pbk). ISBN: 0230202217
Paul Ransome’s book represents a critical and throughout effort to stimulate the reader to reflect about how Ethics, Theory, and Values interact and interplay with the wider socio, historical, and political context. This book is very well structured and exhaustive, and with the very much needed intellectual honesty to make the debate both constructive and inspiring. This book would be beneficial for researchers at any stage of their career and should be a compulsory reading for every academic research method course.
Social research is inevitably connected or influenced by social or personal values and, as researchers, a certain dose of critical thinking and reflexivity is essential. There is nothing wrong to have a starting ‘value position’ or to be entangled in this web of social values; rather, Ransome’s well-supported thesis is that independent and ‘aseptic’ forms of social research are a mirage. The best social researchers can do is to recognise the values and ideals they hold and use them as a point of strength, rather than a limitation or weakness of their own research methodology.
The book is well-structured and, although each chapter could be read on its own, it is best appreciated in its whole: the main thesis of the book is accurately build up from chapter one till the end, bringing in examples from the research world (e.g. Chapter 2 on the Social Research and Professional Codes of Ethics), providing the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings to engage in this critical debate (Chapters 1, 3,4, 5). Chapter 6 enters into the specifics of Action Research and its relevance in the wider debate of the book. Chapter 7 instead looks at how research can be used and affect the social policy. The final chapter is a great conclusion to the whole book, and builds upon the previous chapters to support the reader in the final considerations about the role of the researcher in the wider socio-historical and political panorama.
In particular, the first chapter sets the basis for the whole book by articulating the concept of value and the social theories which underlie them. Ransome describes social research and the underlying values as the effort to reconcile the values drawn from the strong society thesis and the strong individual thesis. The main point of the chapter is that the researchers are the middle persons between society and academia and, because of that, they ought to develop a sense of intellectual (and moral) honesty.
This thesis permeates the book and the following chapters further develop and extend on it. Ransome does a great job in chapter 2 by exposing how the research ethics is actually influenced by and should take in consideration potent social factors like authority, the relationship between participants, the experience of the researcher, and the need to take responsibility for one’s own decisions. Social researchers do not act in a social and ethical vacuum rather, they should consider the welfare and wellbeing of the persons they research as well as the research/professional community which they belong to. This debate is done with a truly admirable intellectual honesty which transpires in the book. For example, Ransome states: “However robust the codes of professional and ethical practice are, social researchers continually need to consider their own positions as social researcher” and that “ultimately it is the personal conscience of the social researcher that moderates ethical research activity” (p.53 italics in the original).
The following chapters discuss the specific cases of evaluation research, and the role of evaluation research in the wider ethical and value debate. Once again, Ransome does the right thing and critically examines the differences in the two approaches, and the advantages and disadvantages of both. His conclusion is that they both have their reasons to be and, in the setting up of the...
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