Ethical Issues in Researching Immigrant Youth Physical Activity: A New Zealand Perspective

Abstract

This research provides an insight on ethical issues in researching immigrant youth physical activity from our experience in New Zealand. Ethics is not be an area that is wellexplored in immigrant studies, particularly among immigrant youth. The available literature appears to be messy because immigrant studies is highly contextual and case specificand so the ethical considerations and problems raised from an immigrant research project are mostly unique. For this reason, pulling some studies together and organizing them in a paper are quite challenging. However, we found out that the conception of Culturally Responsive Relational Reflexive Ethics (CRRRE) became very helpful. We will use these three ethical dimensions not as categorical but more as technical in organizing our writing so as to make it easy in writing and reading. And in addition to CRRRE, we will include commitment as ethics in studying immigrant youth physical activity. Indeed, the ethics we address could be multidimensional and therefore overlapping. More specifically, we should address issues on how these ethical dimensions could become problematic when being practiced vis-à-vis (a) the researchers' sociocultural backgrounds and ideologies; (b) the participants' sociocultural background and immigrant experience; and (c) the phenomenon of immigrant youth living in New Zealand.