Grappling with difficult moral dilemmas is an inherent part of life,
including the sizeable portion of our scholarly careers devoted to research.
That, of course, is why IRBs were created to help us recognize and devise
solutions to these problems that present unwarranted and/or hidden risks to
study participants. However, the four cases discussed here show that it is
not uncommon, during the process of investigating questions related to the
telling of people’s life story, for ethical quandaries to arise when research
that has already been approved in concept runs into unforeseen circumstances
as it is being conducted in the field, when the logistics of an on site
situation call for immediate decisions without opportunity for consultation,
and even when the mandates of the IRB come into conflict with our own
sensibilities and judgments. In three of our four examples, we, as individual
investigators or members of a research team, have made an uneasy
peace with our dilemmas so that we could proceed with our work. We’ve
tried to come to resolution in ways that minimize the possibility of harm to
our informants and to our own sense of conscience, though those resolutions
are clearly imperfect. We hope that in presenting and publishing our
work, the insights derived from interpretation and analysis of the personal
data will do honor to the informants who contributed to the study, as a
counterbalance to compromises that may have been made along the way. A
satisfactory solution for the fourth case, in which the information provided
could endanger the contributor if the source was identified by his totalitarian
government, has not yet been found.