Beyond Procedural Ethics A four-level architecture of research ethics in qualitative research

Qualitative research raises original ethical questions, strongly connected with epistemological and methodological issues. This chapter will first introduce the limits of procedural ethics and briefly present four attempts to overcome them. In so doing, we will a) argue that procedural ethics, with its focus on compliance with rules, is insufficient to meet the ethical issues of qualitative research in practice and b) suggest that a dialogical epistemology offers resources to expand ethics in qualitative research. We will then introduce an integrated, multilevel perspective on research ethics, suggesting questions to foster ethical research practice. We will conclude by discussing how to better support ethical research practice within academia. We will argue that it may be unethical to let researchers face the difficult ethical dilemmas of fieldwork alone, caught between constraining rules and real-time decisions, and suggest offering (and continuously developing) collective and institutional resources to support individual researchers and research teams in their reflections and actions.