Starting out in ethics and your qualitative sport research journey

Ethics is central to all research undertaken. It comes with its own nuances in the landscape of qualitative research. As qualitative research pushes into new online, virtual and in-person methodologies, the process, questions and steps to delivering safe, ethically robust and valued research become even more important. This chapter is not a ‘how-to’ guide, or code of values, steps to take or processes through. Instead, it offers insights from doing ethics. Its authors are a PhD student (part time) in sport studies and a mid-career academic PhD supervisor. It attempts to pull together the essence of a journey you may go on as a researcher from the initial idea to starting to shape a methodology, thinking through ethics and navigating the push-backs, challenges and shaping of your ideas that an ethics board will play in a university setting. This is also balanced with the wider ethical conundrums of a research project that you’ll face. These are very different from the ethics board’s rigorous process and panacea of ‘approval’ in ethics ‘in the field’, ethical dilemmas and how to communicate them to a supervisor and the hidden spaces of ethics—disappointment, trust and mistrust and your own positionality.