Re-Examining Consent and Vulnerability: Qualitative Work with Adolescents and Emerging Adults

When conducting qualitative research in social work, standards have been generated around informed consent. Among them is the assurance that the individual has the ability to give consent and if not possible, a substitute decision maker then used. These standards regarding consent are informed by current ideas around vulnerability, coercion, and the benefits and risks of participating in research. However, the concepts of vulnerability, coercion and consent are complex and benefit from further examination. In this round table, we propose to examine the standards around informed consent and the populations deemed to be especially vulnerable.

The complexity of qualitative research with open-ended interviewing often results in not easily predictable results and potential over-disclosure. For example, in the course of an interview about substance abuse, a teenager may disclose details about a traumatic childhood event that they later realized they were not ready to share, causing serious emotional distress. Because of these issues, additional safeguards and restrictions are often required to reduce harm. Once a participant reaches the age of 18, they are no longer seen as having any additional vulnerability. However, that distinction seems to be based on legal standards rather than on an understanding of social, emotional and behavioral factors as well as a subjective understanding of the benefits of research. With any interviewee, researchers have to be able to weigh how deep to go in an interview and how much to probe and that requires a complex understanding of the competencies of their interviewee. Given the transitional status and the new understanding of the cognitive and emotional development of emerging adults, their vulnerability, especially with a complex information gathering tools, warrants further examination.

Conversely, multicultural conceptualizations of life course development are often ignored in our current standards around vulnerability, especially given our use of a legal and socially constructed view of individual adult consent. While we seek to do “culturally competent” work, we may vary the underpinnings of our research methodology. But this approach may be shortsighted, as our construction of culturally competent research is nested in a western framework. Another potential drawback of our current conceptualization of vulnerability is the exclusion of certain points of view from research. One example in our research involves interviewing young people who have autism and asking them how they view the services they receive. However, they are often seen as too vulnerable, meaning that the recipients of these services could be excluded from research.

We will be discussing research with emerging adults, with adolescents who have disabilities and with people from non-Western cultures who are recent immigrants. We plan to discuss conceptualizations of vulnerability, the dynamic interplay of power, cognitive, social and emotional development and the way that culture influences our conceptualization of research ethics. Our goals include discussing these tensions in qualitative work and potentially find ideas about how to do qualitative research that is both cognizant of vulnerability and responsive to the populations that are being researched.