Ethical considerations

I found the first session on ethics to be quite interesting. I understood that research ethics is essential because research aims to improve or add to the community. So, the health, safety, or well-being of the people involved must not be compromised in the pursuit. 

In response to the task given, I thought about who I would like to target with my data collection, how I would approach them, and the immediate ethical considerations that spring to mind. 

The who- I would like to gather data from professional ballet dancers. I would love to have a mix of dancers who have recently retired (within the last 2-3 years) and dancers who are still performing. The age range of the participants needs to be as comprehensive as possible. 

The what- I would like to create a poll with tick-boxes and possibly a questionnaire to gather qualitative and quantitative data from the participants. I would also like to interview two or three dancers to get more detailed data. 

Ethical considerations-  At first glance, my career transition topic seemed relatively straightforward regarding ethical considerations. Upon deeper thought, however, I came up with some initial considerations to be made and developed. 

These are:

• Informed explicit consent 

• Designing the questions for the questionnaire and tick-boxes appropriately

• Keeping participants in the online surveys and questionnaires anonymous

• Not disclosing the identities of interviewees by using pseudonyms in my writing

• Not collecting unnecessary data such as ethnicity, sexual orientation, familial background