Relational conceptualizations of ethics for psychological research with children: symposium abstract

Research ethics in psychology by and large build on a set of principles which emerged in response to severe ethical mistreatment of human research subjects in medical experiments. While these principles, like the Nuremberg Code of Ethics, undoubtedly marked a leap forward in ensuring research participants’ human rights, they have also met criticism. In 2012, for instance, the Association of Internet Researchers in an audit of its ethical recommendations observed that their recommendations reinforced the Nuremberg Code’s universally standardized, disciplinary/regulatory models of ethics and did not offer guidance in context-specific ethical sensibilities. In response, the associations’ revised ethical code suggests moving towards a more relational-consequentialist understanding of ethics, alike other social scientific fields.
These debates are highly relevant to psychology. The natural-scientific paradigm engrained in, for example, the Nuremberg Code, is ill-equipped for the study of psychological phenomena and does not address the innate problematic position of research participants as objects that can be experimented on and controlled. This mismatch becomes even more pertinent in research concerning children, for example regarding their assent. Overcoming a control-scientific ontology and epistemology and moving to more relational theories, highlights the need to inquire and re-conceptualize common ethical principles.
This symposium gathers four papers that present research conducted together with children instead of on children as mere objects to adult inquiry. Each paper draws on different philosophical inspirations and empirical insights in order to discuss the relevance of theorizing, negotiating and practicing ethics in more context-specific, relational ways.