Unraveling ethics : illuminating the moral dilemmas of research ethics

This essay offers a critical, reflective analysis of some of the sticky moral questions that can entangle feminist researchers as they work to transform a research proposal into an application for ethics committee approval. We write not as philosophers or ethicists but as feminist social scientists reflecting on our struggle to do ethical research and to be ethical researchers in an environment governed by a regulatory model of research ethics. Our story is constructed as two intersecting narratives. In the first section of our essay, "A Narrative about Ethics," we relate our account of how ethical theory plays out in the real world, drawing on our experience of preparing the ethics applications for an interview study with "anorexic" teenage girls and our struggles with two pillars of research ethics policy: defining the research population and eliciting informed consent.1 In the second section of our essay, "Ethics in Our Narrative," we tease out the implications of the research ethics approval process for the people who participate in research and for those who desire to be ethical and moral researchers.