Speakers
Description
In recent years we have seen an increasing number of non-Western researchers in sport-related social research who conduct qualitative interview in their own cultural contexts with following a set of rigorous ethical codes that set up by Western academia. These ethical codes have largely impacted upon the design and practice of those cross-cultural interviews and indeed protect the rights of participants. However, some research also found these ethical codes can be less applicable to the non-Western researchers due to the cross-cultural difference and higher appeal to decolonizing methodologies. Indeed, in the researcher’s PhD project that studies the management and development of sport in China, a series of methodological and ethical issues emerged as the researcher managed to apply the ethical principles required by his university in the UK to interview 55 Chinese sport practitioners. These issues are related to: signing documents and building trust/rapport; engaging with the Chinese ‘gatekeepers’; and c) cross-cultural differences in remote interview. We argue that these issues demonstrate the limitation of simply applying Western ethical codes to proceed qualitative interview in a non-Western context, and the importance of cultural and power asymmetry in cross-cultural social research. In this regard, this article advances our understanding of the ‘principlism’ in current ethical consideration and, specifically, we have proposed three strategies to respond to the issues: using flexible and contextualized approaches to meet both research ethics and local culture; being more sensitive to participants’ socio-cultural backgrounds to gain and maintain access; and using localized research tools to collect data.
