Home Truths: Shifting Ethical Contours in Family Research

In this article I interrogate ethical issues that shape contemporary research in childhood and family studies. This aims to update existing literature in this area and reflect on the challenges posed by new approaches to the study of personal life, emotions and relationships. In particular the ethical issues posed by qualitative mixed-methods and psycho-social approaches. This requires us to consider carefully the threading together of data into individual and/or family case studies. It refines understandings of 'harm' and 'distress' and proposes that we accept unsettling narratives in research on emotional-social worlds. Ideas of 'responsible knowing' are reconfigured and a celebration of the messiness of everyday experience and relationality is advanced, including the acknowledgement of conflicting, unfavourable and difficult data as part of routine 'good enough' parenthood. The article draws on experiences and findings from empirical research with families living in the North of England. In the Behind Closed Doors project I interrogated different qualitative methods of researching family relationships and examined the conceptual frameworks through which we make sense of experiences and understandings of 'family intimacy'.