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Record W4414187560 · doi:10.1017/cls.2025.10020

The Right to Report, the Duty to Report, and the Costs of Reporting: A Framework for Answering Ethical Dilemmas for Qualitative Sociolegal Researchers

2025· article· en· W4414187560 on OpenAlexafffundabout
Alexander McClelland, Neha Chugh, Chris Bruckert

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Journal of Law and Society / Revue Canadienne Droit et Société · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicQualitative Research Methods and Ethics
Canadian institutionsUniversity of OttawaCarleton University
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsSafeguardingDutyHarmConfidentialityCLARITYSupreme courtDeliberationDuty of careQualitative research

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract It is well understood that safeguarding confidentiality is paramount to ensuring the success of research and the protection of participations. However, professional responsibilities and ethics of care can, at times, manifest in a requirement, or even a desire, to breach promises of confidentiality. We unpack this tension by drawing on research on the concepts of legal privilege, the right to report and the duty to report, the impacts of disclosures, as well as a study conducted with socio-legal and criminological researchers and criminalized or socially sanctioned communities who have participated in qualitative a research project. Our findings illustrate that while researchers with a clinical designation (e.g., nurses and social workers), enjoy clarity on professional duties, for researchers without such professional policies (e.g., criminologists) there is little guidance on when and how disclosures could and should take place. That said, when faced with the potential of actual and imminent threats of harm to an identifiable person, most researchers align with Supreme Court of Canada guidance, and would consider reporting, but with much deliberation regarding what constitutes harm, to whom one should report, and the consequences of disclosures. In the interests of contributing to this conversation, we conclude this paper with a decision-making framework that puts the Wigmore test into conversation with the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1999 Smith v Jones decision.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.466
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.311
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Research integrity
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch
DomainCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.983
Threshold uncertainty score0.659

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.4660.311
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0020.002
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0030.002
Bibliometrics0.0130.009
Science and technology studies0.0360.211
Scholarly communication0.0390.034
Open science0.0100.021
Research integrity0.0170.015
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.139
GPT teacher head0.510
Teacher spread0.371 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
DomainMethods
GenreMethods

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".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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Same venueCanadian Journal of Law and Society / Revue Canadienne Droit et SociétéSame topicQualitative Research Methods and EthicsFrench-language works237,207