3 Relational Accountability

In addition to social justice and applying research solutions to participants’ lives, research should benefit and include participants and their associated groups. Social research has historically been isolated from its subject matter and has acted condescendingly towards vulnerable populations^[1]. To counteract this trend, we encourage you to design your research to benefit participants. For example, you might be volunteering with youth and decide to design and evaluate a program to help with their education. Participation Action Research (PAR) often embodies helping participants to create solutions to their problems. The following video and examples provide more context about the ways PAR works and can support research.

Video 3.1 Participatory Action Research by Vera Institute of Justice

Combining Research and Respect

When thinking about your research topic, you must also think about how the processes and outcomes show respect and concern for your participants’ welfare. Principles of reciprocity, monitoring power arrangements among participants, obtaining ongoing consent, permitting participants to tell their stories, and empowering participants as allies in the process are important guiding research principles. According to Hutchinson and colleagues (1994), when we take these principles in our engagement with participants, we provide opportunities for healing. Qualitative interviews can be cathartic, validating to participants’ feelings and experiences (self-acknowledging), provide a sense of purpose, self-awareness (gaining new perspectives about their situation by reflecting on it), healing (providing outlets to express emotions), and providing voice for the disenfranchised^[2]. This means that when considering the issues you are already connected to or wish to connect yourself to, you should also be considering the interest, agency and proximity of the groups that would be willing to be a part of your study. This will be partly conditioned by your positionality.

Relational Accountability

Relational accountability is a term used to describe the honest accounting of Indigenous research in relation to the people their research refers to (and therefore establishes a relationship with)^[3]. “As a researcher,” Wilson (2001) asserts, “you are answering to all your relations”: implying that your research ought to (1) know its relations and (2) gain knowledge “so as to fulfill [your] end of the relationship” (p. 177). With Wilson’s concept in mind, we suggest that you do some relational accounting in generating your research question – asking about your relationship to the voices and variables which will form the datum of your argument – and then make yourself accountable to the group which is providing you access to their knowledge and experiences. Not only will the available participants of your research become more clear to you, but so too will your purpose in gathering information about those participants.