Looking for ethical needles in a 62-year-old haystack, or unearthing gems in the mud?

Abstract

Research ethics is a notoriously complex and contentious terrain to understand and traverse. While several metaphors have been deployed to portray that terrain and to suggest possible ways of navigating it, two in particular appeal to us. One–looking for needles in haystacks – is taken from the book under review here (Goldfarb, 2006). The other–unearthing gems in the mud–is borrowed (with permission and acknowledgment) from a colleague’s critically autoethnographic reflection on his previous research into Japanese university students’ attitudes towards different forms of addressing a foreign teacher in a conversational English class (Midgley, 2008).