Social science perspectives on climate change and development

University of Copenhagen

Xaquín S. Pérez-Sindín López

Category: Ethics in research

  • What is the mission of the university?

    José Ortega y Gasset, in his magnificent work “Mission of the University,” launches a devastating critique: the hyper-specialized professional, incapable of understanding the world beyond their discipline, is the new barbarian of the 20th century. They know how to operate but not how to think; they build machines but do not understand history or the…

  • 🎓 What is university for, really?

    At the start of a course on Social Science Perspectives on Climate Change, I asked students to complete a short questionnaire. The aim was simple: to understand their expectations and, in pedagogical terms, begin establishing a kind of didactic contract for the course. One question was inspired by a debate that has become increasingly visible…

  • New Publication: Ethnography as Method, Practice, and Ethical Commitment

    I’m pleased to share my latest publication, which explores ethnography as a vital method within qualitative research. The article examines what makes ethnography so enduring and so necessary: its ability to capture the complexity, depth, and lived meaning of social life through immersive engagement in the field. Rather than treating people as abstract data points,…

  • Doing research as if participants mattered

    Almost all qualitative and quantitative research into human society involves the participation of other humans. However, they are frequently rendered passively in research outputs as ‘research subjects’. In this post, Helen Kara, argues that the way we define participants in research is outdated and presents three ways in which research participants can be made more central…

  • Decolonizing research methods

    Linda Tuhiwai Smith remains the central reference in any serious discussion of the decolonization of research. This post grows out of listening her in this video lecture, but also out of my own experiences in the field. What follows is not a systematic reconstruction of her work, but an attempt to expand some of the…

  • Ethical research tradeoff: masking or unmasking participants names and places

    Outstanding article on ethics and particularly, on how to proceed when handling the confidentiality of respondents in a given research: “ethnographic masking in an era of data transparency” The common practice is to mask the names of participants and places as for the “do no harm” ethic. In this article, authors argue that the default practice should…

  • Research ethics when gaining access to organizations. Case study

    Original source: “doing qualitative research as if counsel is hiding in the closet” I have also faced challenges when studying political organizations. The most stressful experience so far took place during my research on the experiences of young activists who worked as canvassers, recruiting new members and renewing existing memberships for a number of progressive…

  • Informed consent in political elites studies. Case study

    I stumbled across this article “doing qualitative research as if counsel is hiding in the closet”, a very good example of how a researcher proceed when dealing with research ethics regarding confidentiality and inform consent in such particular studies as “political elites”. When providing a description of the research before the beginning of the interview, researcher hand the…

  • Regretting Motherhood: A Sociopolitical Analysis

    Based on in-depth interviews with twenty-three Israeli mothers, this article seeks to contribute to an ongoing inquiry into women’s subjective experiences of mothering by addressing an understudied maternal emotive and cognitive stance: regretting motherhood. The literature teaches us that within a pronatal monopoly, threatening women that they will inevitably regret not having children acts as…

  • Little Albert experiment (1920) #researchethics

    The Little Albert experiment was a case study showing empirical evidence of classical conditioning in humans. This study was also an example of stimulus generalization. It was carried out by John B. Watson and his graduate student, Rosalie Rayner, at Johns Hopkins University. The results were first published in the February 1920 issue of the…