Ethical issues related to using court based samples in family research

In this presentation I discuss some ethical issues related to the use of court-based samples in family research. The examples I draw upon are from a study on residence and contact disputes in court between divorced and separated parents. In this study we analysed court files and conducted interviews with parents and other family members. The ethical issues that we encountered while conducting this research were: how to contact the interview sample; whether to interview both parties to the dispute; whether to interview other family members and what to do with the resulting data; the presence of children during the interview; and whether to link information on the court files with the interview data. In this presentation I discuss how these issues presented themselves and how we dealt with them.