Once a month we are inviting all researchers to meet via ZOOM to discuss a complex ethics & integrity case. Our purpose is to see ethical practice as a living and vibrant part of our work at Victoria University. While we do not underestimate the importance of formal ethical review, it is well known that issues arise in practice that do not necessarily fit the templates of such review, and that researchers often have to make fast decisions about how to move forward.

Case study:

You are completing a qualitative research project with interviews and focus groups. Your participant group are individuals with a disability (or any other vulnerable group). When transcribing and analysing the data collected you note that there is a lot of word repetition. As you pull together the results section of your paper, many of the quotes that you wish to include have word repetition, or mispronunciation.

·         Can you ‘clean up’ the quotes used by removing repeated words?

·         What impact does this have on the integrity of your findings?

·         By not ‘cleaning up’ the quotations, is there a impact on the readability and clarity of your findings?

·         Where is the line in terms of the integrity of the quotes used and interpretation of these if we are not citing verbatim?

Register for Ethics & Integrity Case of the Month HERE on VU Develop.

For more information about this session please email Researcher.Development@vu.edu.au