Abstract

RORIZ, Marta  and  PADEZ, Cristina. Research ethics regulations and its pitfalls for ethnographic practices. Etnográfica [online]. 2017, vol.21, n.1, pp.75-95. ISSN 0873-6561.

Given the growing tendency of institutionalizing regulatory ethical procedures for research with human subjects, this article discusses the impacts of prospective research in the social sciences, and in particular in ethnographic research. Departing from a historic revision both of research regulation and of anthropology, we analyze what constitutes ethics in ethnographic practice, highlighting the incommensurability that this type of research has been facing in biomedical-based regulation models. Through notions such as risk and the primacy of informed consent we illustrate how the understanding of research with human subjects being mobilized is a reducing one when looked from the angle of social, qualitative or ethnographic research, which is substantially different from research in exact sciences or clinical experimentation.

Keywords : ethics; ethnographic research; regulation; IRB; informed consent.

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