Ethics, Reflexivity and Research: Encounters with Homeless People

Abstract

This paper re ects on ethical issues raised in research with homeless people in rural areas. It argues that the signi cant embracing of dialogic and re exive approaches to social research is likely to render standard approaches to ethical research practice increasingly complex and open to negotiation. Diary commentaries from different individuals in the research team are used to present self-re exive accounts of the ethical complexities and dilemmas encountered in offering explanations of the validity of the research, in carrying out ethnographic encounters with homeless people and in producing and evaluating the outputs of research. Re exivity does not dissolve ethical tensions, but opens up possibilities for new ethical and moral maps with which to explore ethical terrains more appropriately and more honestly. Researching Homeless People… no need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Rewriting you, I write myself anew (hooks, 1990, pp. 151-152). This paper draws on the experiences of the authors in undertaking research on homelessness in rural England, and more particularly in encountering homeless people as an integral part of that research. Amongst the objectives of our work was to contribute new understandings of how and why homelessness occurs in rural areas, and of how homelessness is experienced differently across the spectrum of homeless people in those areas. We also sought to develop suitable ethnographic research techniques which permit a deeper understanding of the coping strategies employed by homeless people in rural areas. In all aspects of this research we have found ourselves involved with issues and arguments about the ethics of researching the 'other'. Before starting, we had discussed

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