Ethical key learnings from participant observation with people with communication support needs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite ongoing advancement of inclusive research methodologies that allow people with disabilities to control, create and take ownership of the research process, the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities who use little or no verbal speech to communicate are underrepresented in research studies. A method with potential to facilitate their research participation is participant observation. Ethical concerns and questions, however, may intimidate or discourage researchers in using the method with people with communication support needs. In this article, I use ethnographic field notes and personal reflections about working as a participant observer with people with communication support needs. I describe and analyse three points of consideration in using the method to draw out ethical key learnings, which revolve around (1) the influence of third parties, (2) observing the person in the absence and presence of research participants, and (3) balancing views on research participants. I end the article with a discussion about the ethical key learnings and argue that participant observation can provide researchers with a considerable amount of time to become familiar with people’s communication preferences, but that they need to be committed to reflecting on and resolving the ethical tensions and questions they experience in researching with people with communication support needs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".