How to investigate psychologically relevant phenomena in the most ethical ways possible is an enduring question for researchers not only in psychology but also in adjacent fields that study human subjectivity. Once acknowledging that both researchers and the people whose lives they want to study are human beings acting in a common world, also inhabited by non-human beings, the relationship between researchers and participants touches upon fundamental questions not only about what it means to do research together, but also what it means to conduct life in this world together. This implies that questions regarding what counts as ethical conduct need to be accentuated and also profoundly redrawn given the encompassing complexity of these relations. In this article, we will shortly review the theoretical foundations and associated problematics of the dominant view of the researcher-researched relationship in current psychological (and other) research ethics. We then present and discuss what we mean by a relational ethical position from within practice and for practice. We will also shortly introduce how the other contributions to this special section advance the theoretical debates on research ethics.
The requirement that theoretical and empirical research is to sustainably benefit not only the nominal researcher, but also the other research participants, is deeply embedded in the conceptual-analytical framework of Psychology from the Standpoint of the Subject (PSS) and its co-researcher principle. PSS research is thus to be of emancipatory relevance to those others the researcher comes to collaborate with. Meanwhile, the question of how this requirement can be prospectively integrated into the design of a research project remains subject to debate. This question emerges as particularly difficult to tackle in research projects that engage in co-research with young children: How can a researcher ensure that the young children s-he works togethe with benefit from the research project? Based on the critical analysis of an earlier research project implemented by the author, the contribution at hand suggests that PSS’ foundational notion of emancipatory relevance needs to be revisited. It argues that if a research project is to sustainably benefit young co-researchers, the technical relevance of the expected mutual emancipation should as well be explicitly considered in the project design. A discussion of recent methodological developments in child-targeted Participatory Design (PD) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) serve as inspiration for this conceptual specification. The contribution thereby invites co-research to further investigate how emancipatory relevance cannot only to be methodologically attained via dissemination of research results and conceptual developments, but also via the actual research process it attempts to engage the co-researchers in irrespective of their age.
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