Ethics in field work research: A case study

Most field work studies report findings but fail to deal with ethical problems encountered during their execution. This paper concentrates on four ethical problems which arose during the conduct of a field work investigation of the life experiences of three student teachers. The four problems were: acquiring permission to begin the study; how far to dig into personal lives to extract necessary information; the pitfalls of doing collaborative research; the more a participant tells, the worse he/she looks. A major implication is that ethical problems given the current bureaucratic and interpersonal climate in urban institutions (universities and city school districts) may be unresolvable, rather than simply a minor hindrance to the researchers and participants.