Ethical and Methodological Dilemmas in Social Science Interventions

This book develops an understanding of researchers' engagements with their subjects as a generative mode of knowledge production that takes place between researchers and their research fields. It promotes the idea that rather than value neutrality, caring may be helpful when a researcher makes suggestions for improvement and constructs interventions. The authors reflect on questions such as how researchers take can sides without taking a fundamental principle of action for granted. What tensions and obstacles do researchers meet while they strive to engage carefully? How do careful engagements affect academic work and output? What inequalities are produced especially when there is funding involved in the research? The contributions discuss a range of topics including responsibility (and response-ability), collaboration, proximity, ethics, bodily entanglements, values, and affective attachments in social research. The book brings together an impressive team of international researchers from different disciplines to nuance the discussion and provides a rich collection of empirical studies from healthcare, urban planning, environmental science, participatory design, and museums, among others. This is a very topical volume for all social and behavioural scientists engaging in research, particularly those engaged in ethnographic research.

Auteur

Doris Lydahl, PhD, is a senior lecturer at the University of Gothenburg, Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, Sweden. She has published in international journals such as Sociology of Health and Illness and Qualitative Research. She has been awarded a number of research grants. Doris was awarded The Torgny T. Segerstedt prize for best article in Sociologisk Forskning in 2017. Her research focuses on when healthcare policy meets practice and on everyday life and routine work as important locations where politics, science and technology meet and enact their normativities.

Niels Christian Mossfeldt Nickelsen is a Professor of Health, Learning and Technology at The University of South-eastern Norway. He is a certified psychologist and specialist in work and organizational psychology. He has published extensively in international journals like Sociology of Health and Illness, Journal of Workplace Learning and Studies in Continuing Learning. He has edited several books and he was awarded several research grants. His research focuses on implications in healthcare of technological arrangements aiming to empower users, qualify professional work and streamline caring through involvement and standardization.