Ethics on the move: methodological dilemmas on the qualitative scientific writing process

Abstract

This paper addresses methodological dilemmas on the qualitative scientific writing process arising from anonymization practices, over a tendency to assume it as an easy and quick preliminary procedure to be performed when analyzing data. Ethical issues are pervasive along both social science practices and paradigms. Sociologists’ commitment to ethical principles is taught and gradually learned during academic training, later accepted through professional institutional membership and derived codes of ethical and professional conduct. Despite commonly associated with research procedures, the issues of security, anonymity and privacy of research subjects are not closed matters when finishing fieldwork, data gathering or obtaining advanced informed consent. Writing often brings out the anonymity versus visibility dilemma, on the one hand, forcing the researcher to decide between respecting subjects’ rights, needs, values, and desires; science, scientific and researcher’s aims, on the other. In this paper, we turn to the analysis of a case taken from the conduction of a sociological qualitative study based on interviews. While revealing the pitfalls behind a seemingly easy operation as the assignment of pseudonyms, empirical illustration also stresses out how ethical issues are pervasive to data analysis and writing and, in that sense, a never-ending process.